THE  FRENCH  IN  THE 
HEART  OF  AMERICA 


JOHN  FINLEY 


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THE  FRENCH  IN 
THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 


THE  FRENCH  IN 
THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 


BY 
JOHN   FINLEY 

COMMISSIONER   OF   EDUCATION   AND  PRESIDENT  OF  THE   UNIVERSITY   OF 
THE   STATE  OF  NEW  YORK 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1915 


Copyright,  1915,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  March,  1915 


PREFACE 

Most  of  what  is  here  written  was  spoken  many 
months  ago  in  the  Amphitheatre  Richelieu  of  the 
Sorbonne,  in  Paris,  and  some  of  it  in  Lille,  Nancy, 
Dijon,  Lyons,  Grenoble,  Montpellier,  Toulouse,  Bor- 
deaux, Poitiers,  Rennes,  and  Caen;  and  all  of  it  was 
in  the  American  publisher's  hands  before  the  great 
war  came,  effacing,  with  its  nearer  adventures,  perils, 
sufferings,  and  anxieties,  the  dim  memories  of  the  days 
when  the  French  pioneers  were  out  in  the  Mississippi 
Valley,  "The  Heart  of  America." 

As  it  was  spoken,  the  purpose  was  to  freshen  and 
brighten  for  the  French  the  memory  of  what  some  of 
them  had  seemingly  wished  to  forget  and  to  visualize 
to  them  the  vigorous,  hopeful,  achieving  life  that  is 
passing  before  that  background  of  Gallic  venturing 
and  praying.  It  was  planned  also  to  publish  the  book 
simultaneously  in  France;  and,  less  than  a  week  be- 
fore the  then  undreamed-of  war,  the  manuscript  was 
carried  for  that  purpose  to  Paris  and  left  for  transla- 
tion in  the  hands  of  Madame  Boutroux,  the  wife  of 
the  beloved  and  eminent  Emile  Boutroux,  head  of  the 
Fondation  Thiers,  and  sister  of  the  illustrious  Henri 
Poincare.  But  wounded  soldiers  soon  came  to  fill  the 
chambers  of  the  scholars  there,  and  the  wife  and 
mother  has  had  to  give  all  her  thought  to  those  who 
have  hazarded  their  all  for  the  France  that  is. 


vi  PREFACE 

But  it  was  my  hope  that  what  was  spoken  in  Paris 
might  some  day  be  read  in  America,  and  particularly 
in  that  valley  which  the  French  evoked  from  the  un- 
known, that  those  who  now  live  there  might  know 
before  what  a  valorous  background  they  are  passing, 
though  I  can  tell  them  less  of  it  than  they  will  learn 
from  the  Homeric  Parkman,  if  they  will  but  read  his 
immortal  story. 

My  first  debt  is  to  him;  but  I  must  include  with  him 
many  who  made  their  contributions  to  these  pages  as 
I  wrote  them  in  Paris.  The  quotation-marks,  diligent 
and  faithful  as  they  have  tried  to  be,  have,  I  fear,  not 
reached  all  who  have  assisted,  but  my  gratitude  ex- 
tends to  every  source  of  fact  and  to  every  guide  of 
opinion  along  the  way,  from  the  St.  Lawrence  to  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico,  even  if  I  have  not  in  every  instance 
known  or  remembered  his  name. 

As  without  Parkman's  long  labors  I  could  not  have 
prepared  these  chapters,  so  without  the  occasion  fur- 
nished by  the  Hyde  Foundation  and  the  nomination 
made  by  the  President  of  Harvard  University  to  the 
exchange  lectureship,  I  should  not  have  undertaken 
this  delightful  filial  task.  The  readers'  enjoyment 
and  profit  of  the  result  will  not  be  the  full  measure  of 
my  gratitude  to  Mr.  James  H.  Hyde,  the  author  of  the 
Foundation,  to  President  Lowell,  and  to  him  whose 
confidence  in  me  persuaded  me  to  it.  But  I  hope 
these  enjoyments  and  profits  will  add  something  to 
what  I  cannot  adequately  express. 

That  what  was  written  could,  in  the  midst  of  official 
duties,  be  prepared  for  the  press  is  due  largely  to  the 
patient,  verifying,  proof-reading  labors  of  Mr.  Frank 
L.  Tolman,  my  young  associate  in  the  State  Library. 


PREFACE  vii 

The  title  of  this  book  (appearing  first  as  the  general 
title  for  some  of  these  chapters  in  Scribner's  Magazine 
in  191 2)  has  a  purely  geographical  connotation.  But 
I  advise  the  reader,  in  these  days  of  bitterness,  to  go 
no  further  if  he  carry  any  hatred  in  his  heart. 


John  Finley. 


State  Education  Building,  Albany,  N.  Y. 
Washington's  Birthday,  1915. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  FAGS 

I.    Introduction i 

II.    From  Labrador  to  the  Lakes 4 

III.  The  Paths  of  the  Gray  Friars  and  Black  Gowns  23 

IV.  From  the  Great  Lakes  to  the  Gulf    ....  46 

V.    The  River  Colbert:  A  Course  and  Scene  of 

Empire 70 

VI.    The  Passing  of  New  France  and  the  Dream  of 

Its  Revival 99 

VII.    The  Peopling  of  the  Wilderness 126 

VIII.    The  Parcelling  of  the  Domain 150 

IX.    In  the  Trails  of  the  Coureurs  de  Bois    .     .     .  174 

X.    In  the  Wake  of  the  "Griffin" 196 

XI.    Western    Cities    That    Have    Sprung    from 

French  Forts 216 

XII.    Western  Towns  and  Cities  That  Have  Sprung 

from  French  Portage  Paths 246 

XIII.  From  La  Salle  to  Lincoln 270 

XIV.  The  Valley  of  the  New  Democracy    ....  291 

XV.    Washington:  The  Union  of  the  Eastern  and 

the  Western  Waters 309 

XVI.    The  Producers 329 

ix 


x  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XVII.    The  Thought  of  To-Morrow 354 

XVIII.    "The  Men  of  Always" 371 

XIX.    The  Heart  of  America 391 

Epilogue 401 

Index 419 


THE  FRENCH  IN 
THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 


From  "a  series  of  letters  to  a  friend  in  England,"  in 
1793,  "tending  to  shew  the  probable  rise  and  grandeur 
of  the  American  Empire": 

"It  struck  me  as  a  natural  object  of  enquiry  to  what  a 
future  increase  and  elevation  of  magnitude  and  grandeur 
the  spreading  empire  of  America  might  attain,  when  a 
country  had  thus  suddenly  risen  from  an  uninhabited 
wild,  to  the  quantum  of  population  necessary  to  govern 
and  regulate  its  own  administration." 

G.  Imlay 

("A  captain  in  the  American 
Army  during  the  late  war,  and 
a  commissioner  for  laying  out 
land  in  the  back  settlements  ")• 


CHAPTER  I 
INTRODUCTION 

I  ADDRESS  the  reader  as  living  in  the  land  from 
which  the  pioneers  of  France  went  out  to  America; 
first,  because  I  wrote  these  chapters  in  that  land, 
a  few  steps  from  the  Seine;  second,  because  I  should 
otherwise  have  to  assume  the  familiarity  of  the  reader 
with  much  that  I  have  gathered  into  these  chapters, 
though  the  reader  may  have  forgotten  or  never  known 
it;  and,  third,  because  I  wish  the  reader  to  look  at 
these  new-world  regions  from  without,  and,  standing 
apart  and  aloof,  to  see  the  present  restless  life  of  these 
valleys,  especially  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,  against 
the  background  of  Gallic  adventure  and  pious  endeavor 
which  is  seen  in  richest  color,  highest  charm,  and  truest 
value  at  a  distance. 

But,  while  I  must  ask  my  readers  in  America  to  ex- 
patriate themselves  in  their  imaginations  and  to  look 
over  into  this  valley  as  aliens,  I  wish  them  to  know 
that  I  write,  though  myself  in  temporary  exile,  as  a 
son  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,  as  a  geographical  descen- 
dant of  France;  that  my  commission  is  given  me  of  my 
love  for  the  boundless  stretch  of  prairie  and  plain 
whose  virgin  sod  I  have  broken  with  my  plough;  of 
the  lure  of  the  waterways  and  roads  where  I  have  fol- 
lowed the  boats  and  the  trails  of  French  voyageurs 
and  coureurs  de  bois;   and  of  the  possessing  interest  of 


2  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  epic  story  of  the  development  of  that  most  virile 
democracy  known  to  the  world.  The  "Divine  River," 
discovered  by  the  French,  ran  near  the  place  of  my 
birth.  My  county  was  that  of  "La  Salle,"  a  division  of 
the  land  of  the  Illinois,  "the  land  of  men."  The  Fort, 
or  the  Rock,  St.  Louis,  built  by  La  Salle  and  Tonty, 
was  only  a  few  miles  distant.  A  little  farther,  a  town, 
Marquette,  stands  near  the  place  where  the  French 
priest  and  explorer,  Pere  Marquette,  ministered  to  the 
Indians.  Up-stream,  a  busy  city  keeps  the  name  of 
Joliet  on  the  lips  of  thousands,  though  the  brave  ex- 
plorer would  doubtless  not  recognize  it  as  his  own; 
and  below,  the  new-made  Hennepin  Canal  makes  a 
shorter  course  to  the  Mississippi  River  than  that  which 
leads  by  the  ruins  of  La  Salle's  Fort  Crevecceur.  It 
is  of  such  environment  that  these  chapters  were  sug- 
gested, and  it  has  been  by  my  love  for  it,  rather  than 
by  any  profound  scholarship,  that  they  have  been  dic- 
tated. I  write  not  as  a  scholar — since  most  of  my  life 
has  been  spent  in  action,  not  in  study — but  as  an  aca- 
demic coureur  de  bois  and  of  what  I  have  known  and 
seen  in  the  Valley  of  Democracy,  the  fairest  and  most 
fruitful  of  the  regions  where  France  was  pioneer  in 
America. 

There  should  be  written  in  further  preface  to  all  the 
chapters  which  follow  a  paragraph  from  the  beloved 
historian  to  whom  I  am  most  indebted  and  of  whom 
I  shall  speak  later  at  length.  I  first  read  its  entranc- 
ing sentences  when  a  youth  in  college,  a  quarter  of  a 
century  ago,  and  I  have  never  been  free  of  its  spell. 
I  would  have  it  written  not  only  in  France  but  some- 
where at  the  northern  portals  of  the  American  con- 
tinent, on  the  cliffs  of  the  Saguenay,  or  on  that  Rock 


INTRODUCTION  3 

of  Quebec  which  saw  the  first  vessel  of  the  French  come 
up  the  river  and  supported  the  last  struggle  for  formal 
dominion  of  a  land  which  the  French  can  never  lose, 
except  by  forgetting:  "Again  their  ghostly  camp-fires 
seem  to  burn,  and  the  fitful  light  is  cast  around  on 
lord  and  vassal  and  black-robed  priest,  mingled  with 
wild  forms  of  savage  warriors,  knit  in  close  fellowship 
on  the  same  stern  errand.  A  boundless  vision  grows 
upon  us;  an  untamed  continent;  vast  wastes  of  forest 
verdure;  mountains  silent  in  primeval  sleep;  river, 
lake,  and  glimmering  pool;  wilderness  oceans  mingling 
with  the  sky.  Such  was  the  domain  which  France  con- 
quered for  Civilization.  Plumed  helmets  gleamed  in 
the  shade  of  its  forests,  priestly  vestments  in  its  dens 
and  fastnesses  of  ancient  barbarism.  Men  steeped  in 
antique  learning,  pale  with  the  close  breath  of  the 
cloister,  here  spent  the  noon  and  evening  of  their  lives, 
ruled  savage  hordes  with  a  mild,  parental  sway,  and 
stood  serene  before  the  direst  shapes  of  death.  Men 
of  courtly  nurture,  heirs  to  the  polish  of  a  far-reaching 
ancestry,  here,  with  their  dauntless  hardihood,  put  to 
shame  the  boldest  sons  of  toil."  * 

These  are  the  regions  we  are  to  explore,  and  these 
are  the  men  with  whom  we  are  to  begin  the  journey. 

1  Parkman:  "  Pioneers  of  France  in  the  New  World."  New  library  edition. 
Introduction,  xii-xiii. 


CHAPTER  II 
FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES 

WE  shall  not  be  able  to  enter  the  valley  of 
the  Mississippi  in  this  chapter.  There  is  a 
long  stretch  of  the  nearer  valley  of  the  St. 
Lawrence  that  must  first  be  traversed.  Just  before  I 
left  America  in  1910  two  men  flew  in  a  balloon  from 
St.  Louis,  the  very  centre  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,  to 
the  Labrador  gate  of  the  St.  Lawrence,  the  vestibule 
valley,  in  a  few  hours,  but  it  took  the  French  pioneers 
a  whole  century  and  more  to  make  their  way  out  to 
where  those  aviators  began  their  flight.  We  have  but 
a  few  pages  for  a  journey  over  a  thousand  miles  of 
stream  and  portage  and  a  hundred  years  of  time.  I 
must  therefore  leave  most  of  the  details  of  suffering 
from  the  rigors  of  the  north,  starvation,  and  the  Iro- 
quois along  the  way  to  your  memories,  or  to  your 
fresh  reading  of  Parkman,  Winsor,  Fiske,  and  Thwaites 
in  English,  or  to  Le  Clercq,  Lescarbot,  Champlain, 
Charlevoix,  Sagard,  and  others  in  French. 

The  story  of  the  exploration  and  settlement  of 
those  valleys  beyond  the  cod-banks  of  Newfoundland 
begins  not  in  the  ports  of  Spain  or  Portugal,  nor  in 
England,  but  in  a  little  town  on  the  coast  of  France, 
standing  on  a  rocky  promontory  thrust  out  into  the 
sea,  only  a  few  hours'  ride  from  Paris,  in  the  ancient 

4 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES     5 

town  of  St.  Malo,  the  "nursery  of  hardy  mariners," 
the  cradle  of  the  spirit  of  the  West.1 

For  a  son  of  France  was  the  first  of  Europeans,  so 
far  as  we  certainly  know,  to  penetrate  beyond  the  tide- 
water of  those  confronting  coasts,  the  first  to  step  over 
the  threshold  of  the  unguessed  continent,  north,  at  any 
rate,  of  Mexico.  Columbus  claimed  at  most  but  an 
Asiatic  peninsula,  though  he  knew  that  he  had  found 
only  islands.  The  Cabots,  in  the  service  of  England, 
sailing  along  its  mysterious  shores,  had  touched  but 
the  fringe  of  the  wondrous  garment.  Ponce  de  Leon, 
a  Spaniard,  had  floundered  a  few  leagues  from  the  sea 
in  Florida  searching  for  the  fountain  of  youth.  Nar- 
vaez  had  found  the  wretched  village  of  Appalache  but 
had  been  refused  admission  by  the  turbid  Mississippi 
and  was  carried  out  to  an  ocean  grave  by  its  fierce 
current;  Verrazano,  an  Italian  in  the  employ  of  France, 
living  at  Rouen,  had  entered  the  harbor  of  New  York, 
had  enjoyed  the  primitive  hospitality  of  what  is  now 
a  most  fashionable  seaside  resort  (Newport),  had  seen 
the  peaks  of  the  White  Mountains  from  his  deck,  and, 
as  he  supposed,  had  looked  upon  the  Indian  Ocean,  or 
the  Sea  of  Verrazano,  which  has  shrunk  to  the  Chesa- 
peake Bay  on  our  modern  maps  and  now  reaches  not 
a  fiftieth  part  of  the  way  to  the  other  shore. 

It  was  a  true  son  of  France  who  first  had  the  per- 
sistence of  courage  and  the  endurance  of  imagination 
to  enter  the  continent  and  see  the  gates  close  behind 
him — Jacques  Cartier,  a  master  pilot  of  St.  Malo, 
commissioned  of  his  own  intrepid  desire  and  of  the 

1  After  reaching  Paris  on  my  first  journey,  the  first  place  to  which  I  made 
a  pilgrimage,  even  before  the  tombs  of  kings  and  emperors  and  the  gal- 
leries of  art,  was  this  gray-bastioned  town  of  St.  Malo. 


6  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

jealous  ambition  of  King  Francis  I  to  bring  fresh  tid- 
ings of  the  mysterious  "square  gulf,"  which  other 
Frenchmen,  Denys  and  Aubert,  may  have  entered  a 
quarter  of  a  century  earlier,  and  which  it  was  hoped 
might  disclose  a  passage  to  the  Indies. 

It  was  from  St.  Malo  that  Cartier  set  sail  on  the 
highroad  to  Cathay,  as  he  imagined,  one  April  day  in 
1 534  in  two  ships  of  sixty  tons  each.1  There  is  preserved 
in  St.  Malo  what  is  thought  to  be  a  list  of  those  who 
signed  the  ship's  papers  subscribed  under  Cartier's 
own  hand.  It  is  no  such  instrument  as  the  "Com- 
pact" which  the  men  of  the  Mayflower  signed  as  they 
approached  the  continent  nearly  a  century  later,  but 
it  is  none  the  less  fateful. 

The  autumn  leaves  had  not  yet  fallen  from  the  trees 
of  Brittany  when  the  two  ships  that  started  out  in 
April  appeared  again  in  the  harbor  of  St.  Malo,  carry- 
ing two  dusky  passengers  from  the  New  World  as 
proofs  of  Cartier's  ventures.  He  had  made  reconnois- 
sance  of  the  gulf  behind  Newfoundland  and  returned 
for  fresh  means  of  farther  quest  toward  Cathay. 

The  leaves  were  but  come  again  on  the  trees  of 
Brittany  when,  with  a  larger  crew  in  three  small  ves- 
sels (one  of  only  forty  tons),  he  again  went  out  with  the 
ebb-tide  from  St.  Malo;  his  men,  some  of  whom  had 
been  gathered  from  the  jails,  having  all  made  their  con- 
fession and  attended  mass,  and  received  the  benedic- 
tion of  the  bishop.  In  August  he  entered  the  great  river 
St.  Lawrence,  whose  volume  of  water  was  so  great 
as  to  brighten  Cartier's   hopes   of  having   found   the 

1 1  crossed  back  over  the  same  ocean,  nearly  four  hundred  years  later,  to 
a  French  port  in  a  steamship  of  a  tonnage  equal  to  that  of  a  fleet  of  four 
hundred  of  Cartier's  boats;  so  has  the  sea  bred  giant  children  of  such  hardy 
parentage. 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES     7 

northern  way  to  India.  On  he  sailed,  with  his  two 
dusky  captives  for  pilots,  seeing  with  regret  the  banks 
of  the  river  gradually  draw  together  and  hearing 
unwelcome  word  of  the  freshening  of  its  waters — on 
past  the  "gorge  of  the  gloomy  Saguenay  with  its  tower- 
ing cliffs  and  sullen  depths,  depths  which  no  sounding- 
line  can  fathom,  and  heights  at  whose  dizzy  verge  the 
wheeling  eagle  seems  a  speck";  on  past  frowning 
promontory  and  wild  vineyards,  to  the  foot  of  the 
scarped  cliff  of  Quebec,  now  "rich  with  heroic  mem- 
ories, then  but  the  site  of  a  nameless  barbarism"; 
thence,  after  parley  with  the  Indian  chief  Donnacona 
and  his  people,  on  through  walls  of  autumn  foliage  and 
frost-touched  meadows  to  where  the  Lachine  Rapids 
mocked  with  unceasing  laughter  those  who  dreamed 
of  an  easy  way  to  China.  There,  entertained  at  the 
Indian  capital,  he  was  led  to  the  top  of  a  hill,  such  as 
Montmartre,  from  whose  height  he  saw  his  Cathay 
fade  into  a  stretch  of  leafy  desert  bounded  only  by  the 
horizon  and  threaded  by  two  narrow  but  hopeful 
ribbons  of  water.  There,  hundreds  of  miles  from  the 
sea,  he  stood,  probably  the  only  European,  save  for  his 
companions,  inside  the  continent,  between  Mexico 
and  the  Pole;  for  De  Soto  had  not  yet  started  for  his 
burial  in  the  Mississippi;  the  fathers  of  the  Pilgrim 
Fathers  were  still  in  their  cradles;  Narvaez's  men  had 
come  a  little  way  in  shore  and  vanished;  Cabeca  de 
Vaca  was  making  his  almost  incredible  journey  from 
the  Texas  coast  to  the  Pacific;  Captain  John  Smith 
was  not  yet  born;  and  Henry  Hudson's  name  was  to 
remain  obscure  for  three  quarters  of  a  century.  Francis 
I  had  sneeringly  inquired  of  Charles  V  if  he  and  the 
King  of  Portugal  had  parcelled  out  the  world  between 


8  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

them,  and  asked  to  see  the  last  will  and  testament  of 
the  patriarch  Adam.  If  King  Francis  had  been  per- 
mitted to  see  it,  he  would  have  found  a  codicil  for 
France  written  that  day  against  the  bull  of  Pope 
Alexander  VI  and  against  the  hazy  English  claim  of 
the  Cabots.  For  the  river,  "the  greatest  without 
comparison,"  as  Cartier  reported  later  to  his  king, 
"that  is  known  to  have  ever  been  seen,"  carried  drain- 
age title  to  a  realm  larger  many  times  than  all  the 
lands  of  the  Seine  and  the  Rhone  and  the  Loire,  and 
richer  many  times  than  the  land  of  spices  to  which  the 
falls  of  Lachine,  "the  greatest  and  swiftest  fall  of 
water  that  any  where  hath  beene  seene,"  seemed  now 
to  guard  the  way. 

"Hochelaga"  the  Indians  called  their  city — the 
capital  of  the  river  into  which  the  sea  had  narrowed, 
a  thousand  miles  inland  from  the  coasts  of  Labrador 
which  but  a  few  years  before  were  the  dim  verge  of  the 
world  and  were  believed  even  then  to  be  infested  with 
griffins  and  fiends — a  city  which  vanished  within  the 
next  three  quarters  of  a  century.  For  when  Cham- 
plain  came  in  1611  to  this  site  to  build  his  outpost,  not 
a  trace  was  left  of  the  palisades  which  Cartier  de- 
scribes and  one  of  his  men  pictures,  not  an  Indian  was 
left  of  the  population  that  gave  such  cordial  welcome 
to  Cartier.  And  for  all  Champlain's  planning  it  was 
still  a  meadow  and  a  forest — the  spring  flowers  "bloom- 
ing in  the  young  grass"  and  birds  of  varied  plumage 
flitting  "among  the  boughs" — when  the  mystic  and 
soldier  Maisonneuve  and  his  associates  of  Montreal, 
forty  men  and  four  women,  in  an  enterprise  conceived 
in  the  ancient  Church  of  St.  Germain-des-Pres  and 
consecrated  to  the  Holy  Family  by  a  solemn  cere- 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES     9 

monial  at  Notre-Dame,  knelt  upon  this  same  ground 
in  1642  before  the  hastily  reared  and  decorated  altar 
while  Father  Vimont,  standing  in  rich  vestments,  ad- 
dressed them.  "You  are,"  he  said,  "a  grain  of  mus- 
tard-seed that  shall  rise  and  grow  till  its  branches 
overshadow  the  earth.  You  are  few,  but  your  work  is 
the  work  of  God.  His  smile  is  on  you  and  your  chil- 
dren shall  fill  the  land. "  l  Parkman  (from  the  same 
French  authority)  finishes  the  picture  of  the  memor- 
able day:  "The  afternoon  waned;  the  sun  sank  behind 
the  western  forest,  and  twilight  came  on.  Fireflies 
were  twinkling  over  the  darkened  meadow.  They 
caught  them,  tied  them  with  threads  into  shining  fes- 
toons and  hung  them  before  the  altar,  where  the  Host 
remained  exposed.  Then  they  pitched  their  tents, 
lighted  their  bivouac  fires,  stationed  their  guards  and 
lay  down  to  rest.  Such  was  the  birth-night  of  Mon- 
treal."2 

On  the  10th  of  September  in  1910  two  hundred 
thousand  people  knelt  in  that  same  place  before  an  out- 
of-door  altar,  and  the  incandescent  lights  were  the 
fireflies  of  a  less  romantic  and  a  more  practical  age. 

1  Francois  Dollier  de  Casson,  "Histoire  du  Montreal,"  quoted  in  Park- 
man's  "Jesuits  in  North  America,"  p.  209,  a  free  rendering  of  the  original. 
"Voyez-vous,  messieurs,  dit-il,  ce  que  vous  voyez  n'est  qu'un  grain  de 
moutarde,  mais  il  est  jete  par  des  mains  si  pieuses  et  animees  de  l'esprit 
de  la  foi  et  de  la  religion  que  sans  doute  il  faut  que  le  ciele  est  de  grands 
desseins  puisqu'il  se  sert  de  tels  ouvriers,  et  je  ne  fais  aucun  doute  que  ce 
petit  grain  ne  produise  un  grand  arbre,  ne  fasse  un  jour  des  merveilles,  ne 
soit  multiplie  et  ne  s'etende  de  toutes  parts." 

2  Francois  Dollier  de  Casson,  "Histoire  du  Montreal,"  quoted  in  Park- 
man's  "Jesuits  in  North  America,"  p.  209,  a  free  rendering  of  the  original. 
"On  avait  point  de  lampes  ardentes  devant  le  St.  Sacrement,  mais  on  avait 
certaines  mouches  brillantes  qui  y  luisaient  fort  agreablement  jour  et  nuit 
etant  suspendues  par  des  filets  d'une  facon  admirable  et  belle,  et  toute 
propre  a  honorer  selon  la  rusticite  de  ce  pays  barbare,  le  plus  adorable  de 
nos  mysteres." 


io    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Maisonneuve  and  Mademoiselle  Mance  would  have 
been  enraptured  by  such  a  scene,  but  it  would  have 
given  even  greater  satisfaction  to  the  pilot  of  St.  Malo 
if  he  could  have  seen  that  commercial  capital  of  the 
north  lying  beneath  the  mountain  which  still  bears 
the  name  he  gave  it,  and  stretching  far  beyond  the 
bounds  of  the  palisaded  Hochelaga.  It  should  please 
France  to  know  that  nearly  two  hundred  thousand 
French  keep  the  place  of  the  footprint  of  the  first 
pioneer,  Jacques  Cartier.  When  a  few  weeks  before 
my  coming  to  France  I  was  making  my  way  by  a  trail 
down  the  side  of  Mount  Royal  through  the  trees — 
some  of  which  may  have  been  there  in  Cartier's  day — 
two  lads,  one  of  as  beautiful  face  as  I  have  ever  seen, 
though  tear-stained,  emerged  from  the  bushes  and 
begged  me,  in  a  language  which  Jacques  Cartier  would 
have  understood  better  than  I,  to  show  them  the  way 
back  to  "rue  St.  Maurice,"  which  I  did,  finding  that 
street  to  be  only  a  few  paces  from  the  place  where 
Champlain  had  made  a  clearing  for  his  "Place  Royale" 
in  the  midst  of  the  forest  three  hundred  years  ago. 
That  beautiful  boy,  Jacques  Jardin,  brown-eyed,  bare- 
kneed,  in  French  soldier's  cap,  is  to  me  the  living  in- 
carnation of  the  adventure  which  has  made  even  that 
chill  wilderness  blossom  as  a  garden  in  Brittany. 

But  to  come  back  to  Cartier.  It  was  too  late  in  the 
season  to  make  further  explorations  where  the  two 
rivers  invited  to  the  west  and  northwest,  so  Cartier 
joined  the  companions  who  had  been  left  near  Quebec 
to  build  a  fort  and  make  ready  for  the  winter.  As  if 
to  recall  that  bitter  weather,  the  hail  beat  upon  the 
windows  of  the  museum  at  St.  Malo  on  the  day  when 
I  was  examining  there  the  relics  of  the  vessel  which 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES    n 

Cartier  was  obliged  to  leave  in  the  Canadian  river, 
because  so  many  of  his  men  had  died  of  scurvy  and  ex- 
posure that  he  had  not  sufficient  crew  to  man  the  three 
ships  home.  And  probably  not  a  man  would  have  been 
left  and  not  even  the  Grande  H ermine  would  have 
come  back  if  a  specific  for  scurvy  had  not  been  found 
before  the  end  of  the  winter — a  decoction  learned  of 
the  Indians  and  made  from  the  bark  or  leaves  of  a 
tree  so  efficacious  that  if  all  the  "doctors  of  Lorraine 
and  Montpellier  had  been  there,  with  all  the  drugs  of 
Alexandria,  they  could  not  have  done  so  much  in  a 
year  as  the  said  tree  did  in  six  days;  for  it  profited  us 
so  much  that  all  those  who  would  use  it  recovered 
health  and  soundness,  thanks  to  God." 

Cartier  appears  again  in  July,  1536,  before  the  ram- 
parts of  St.  Malo  with  two  of  his  vessels.  The  savages 
on  the  St.  Charles  were  given  the  Petite  Hermine,1  its 
nails  being  accepted  in  part  requital  for  the  tempo- 
rary loss  of  their  chief.  Donnacona,  whom  Cartier  kid- 
napped. 

A  cross  was  left  standing  on  the  shores  of  the  St. 
Lawrence  with  the  fleur-de-lis  planted  near  it.  Don- 
nacona was  presented  to  King  Francis  and  baptized, 
and  with  all  his  exiled  companions  save  one  was  buried, 
where  I  have  not  yet  learned,  but  probably  somewhere 

1  James  Phinney  Baxter,  "A  Memoir  of  Jacques  Cartier,"  p.  200,  writes: 
"The  remains  of  this  ship,  the  Petite  Hermine,  were  discovered  in  1843,  in 
the  river  St.  Charles,  at  the  mouth  of  the  rivulet  known  as  the  Lairet. 
These  precious  relics  were  found  buried  under  five  feet  of  mud,  and  were 
divided  into  two  portions,  one  of  which  was  placed  in  the  museum  of  the 
Literary  and  Historical  Society  of  Quebec,  and  destroyed  by  fire  in  1854. 
The  other  portion  was  sent  to  the  museum  at  St.  Malo,  where  it  now  re- 
mains. For  a  particular  account  vide  Le  Canadien  of  August  25,  and  the 
Quebec  Gazette  of  August  30,  1843;  'Transactions  of  the  Quebec  Literary 
and  Historical  Society  for  1862';  and  'Picturesque  Quebec,'  Le  Moine, 
Montreal,  1862,  pp.  484-7." 


12    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

out  on  that  headland  of  France  nearest  Stadacone,  the 
seat  of  his  lost  kingdom. 

Cartier  busied  himself  in  St.  Malo  (or  Limoilou)  till 
called  upon,  in  1541,  when  peace  was  restored  in  France 
to  take  the  post  of  captain-general  of  a  new  expedition 
under  Sieur  de  Roberval,  "Lord  of  Norembega,  Vice- 
roy and  Lieutenant-General  of  Canada,  Hochelaga, 
Saguenay,  Newfoundland,  Belle  Isle,  Carpunt,  Lab- 
rador, the  Great  Bay  and  Baccalaos,"1  with  a  com- 
mission of  discovery,  settlement,  and  conversion  of 
the  Indians,  and  with  power  to  ransack  the  prisons 
for  material  with  which  to  carry  out  these  ambitious 
and  pious  designs,  thereby,  as  the  king  said,  employing 
"clemency  in  doing  a  merciful  and  meritorious  work 
toward  some  criminals  and  malefactors,  that  by  this 
they  may  recognize  the  Creator  by  rendering  Him 
thanks,  and  amending  their  lives."  Again  Cartier 
(Roberval  having  failed  to  arrive  in  time)  sets  out; 
again  he  passes  the  gloomy  Saguenay  and  the  cliff  of 
Quebec;  again  he  leaves  his  companions  to  prepare 
for  the  winter;  again  he  ascends  the  river  to  explore 
the  rapids,  still  dreaming  of  the  way  to  Asia;  again 
after  a  miserable  winter  he  sails  back  to  France,  eluding 
Roberval  a  year  late,  and  carrying  but  a  few  worthless 
quartz  diamonds  and  a  little  sham  gold.  Then  Rober- 
val, the  Lord  of  Norembega,  reigns  alone  in  his  vast 
and  many-titled  domain,  for  another  season  of  snows 
and  famine,  freely  using  the  lash  and  gibbet  to  keep 

'Baxter,  "Memoir  of  Jacques  Cartier,"  note,  p.  40,  writes:  "These  titles 
are  given  on  the  authority  of  Charlevoix,  'Histoire  de  la  Nouvelle  France,' 
Paris,  1744,  tome  1,  p.  32.  Reference,  however,  to  the  letters  patent  of 
January  15,  1540,  from  which  he  professes  to  quote  and  which  are  still 
preserved  and  can  be  identified  as  the  same  which  he  says  were  to  be  found 
in  the  Etat  Ordinaire  des  Guerres  in  the  Chambre  des  Comptes  at  Paris, 
does  not  bear  out  his  statement." 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES    13 

his  penal  colonists  in  subjection;  and  then,  according 
to  some  authorities,  supported  by  the  absence  of 
Cartier's  name  from  the  local  records  of  St.  Malo  for 
a  few  months,  Cartier  was  sent  out  to  bring  the  Lord 
of  Norembega  home. 

So  Cartier's  name  passes  from  the  pages  of  history, 
even  if  it  still  appears  again  in  the  records  of  St.  Malo, 
and  he  spends  the  rest  of  his  days  on  the  rugged  little 
peninsula  thrust  out  from  France  toward  the  west,  as 
it  were  a  hand.  A  few  miles  out  of  St.  Malo  the  Breton 
tenants  of  the  Cartier  manor,  Port  Cartier,  to-day 
carry  their  cauliflower  and  carrots  to  market  and 
seemingly  wonder  at  my  curiosity  in  seeking  Cartier's 
birthplace  rather  than  Chateaubriand's  tomb.  It 
were  far  fitter  that  Cartier  instead  of  Chateaubriand 
should  have  been  buried  out  on  the  "Plage"  beyond 
the  ramparts,  exiled  for  a  part  of  every  day  by  the  sea, 
for  the  amphibious  life  of  this  master  pilot,  going  in  and 
out  of  the  harbor  with  the  tide,  had  added  to  France 
a  thousand  miles  of  coast  and  river,  had  opened  the 
door  of  the  new  world,  beyond  the  banks  of  the 
Baccalaos,  to  the  imaginations  of  Europe,  and  unwit- 
tingly showed  the  way  not  to  Asia,  but  to  a  valley 
with  which  Asia  had  nothing  to  compare. 

For  a  half  century  after  Cartier's  home  bringing  of 
Roberval — the  very  year  that  De  Soto's  men  quitted 
in  misery  the  lower  valley  of  the  Mississippi — there  is 
no  record  of  a  sail  upon  the  river  St.  Lawrence.  Hoche- 
laga  became  a  waste,  its  tenants  annihilated  or  scat- 
tered, and  Cartier's  fort  was  all  but  obliterated.  The 
ambitious  symbols  of  empire  were  alternately  buried 
in  snows  and  blistered  by  heat.  France  had  too  much 
to  think  of  at  home.    But  still,  as  Parkman  says,  "the 


14    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

wandering  Esquimaux  saw  the  Norman  and  Breton 
sails  hovering  around  some  lonely  headland  or  anchored 
in  fleets  in  the  harbor  of  St.  John,  and  still  through 
salt  spray  and  driving  mist,  the  fishermen  dragged  up 
the  riches  of  the  sea."  For  "codfish  must  still  be  had 
for  Lent  and  fast-days."  Another  authority  pictures 
the  Breton  babies  of  this  period  playing  with  trinkets 
made  of  walrus  tusks,  and  the  Norman  maidens  decked 
in  furs  brought  by  their  brothers  from  the  shores  of 
Anticosti  and  Labrador. 

Meanwhile  in  Brouage  on  the  Bay  of  Biscay  a  boy 
is  born  whose  spirit,  nourished  of  the  tales  of  the  new 
world,  is  to  make  a  permanent  colony  where  Cartier 
had  found  and  left  a  wilderness,  and  is  to  write  his 
name  foremost  on  the  "bright  roll  of  forest  chivalry" 
— Samuel  Champlain. 

Once  the  sea,  I  am  told,  touched  the  massive 
walls  of  Brouage.  There  are  still  to  be  seen,  several 
feet  below  the  surface,  rings  to  which  mariners  and 
fishermen  moored  their  boats — they  who  used  to  come 
to  Brouage  for  salt  with  which  to  cure  their  fish,  they 
whose  stories  of  the  Newfoundland  cod-banks  stirred 
in  the  boy  Champlain  the  desire  for  discovery  beyond 
their  fogs.  The  boys  in  the  school  of  Hiers-Brouage 
a  mile  away — in  the  Mairie  where  I  went  to  consult 
the  parish  records — seemed  to  know  hardly  more  of 
that  land  which  the  Brouage  boy  of  three  centuries 
before  had  lifted  out  of  the  fogs  by  his  lifelong  heroic 
adventures  than  did  the  boy  Champlain,  which  makes 
me  feel  that  till  all  French  children  know  of,  and  all 
American  children  remember  Brouage,  the  story  of 
France  in  America  needs  to  be  retold.  The  St.  Law- 
rence Valley  has  not  forgotten,  but  I  could  not  learn 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES    15 

that  a  citizen  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  had  made  re- 
cent pilgrimage  to  this  spot.1 

In  the  year  of  Champlain's  birth  the  frightful  colonial 
tragedy  in  Florida  was  nearing  its  end.  By  the  year  1603 
he  had,  in  Spanish  employ,  made  a  voyage  of  two  years 
in  the  West  Indies,  the  unique  illustrated  journal2  of 
which  in  his  own  hand  was  for  two  centuries  and  more 
in  Dieppe,  but  has  recently  been  acquired  by  a  library 
in  the  United  States3— a  journal  most  precious  especially 
in  its  prophecy  of  the  Panama  Canal:4  "One  might 
judge,  if  the  territory  four  leagues  in  extent,  lying 
between  Panama  and  the  river  were  cut  thru,  he  could 
pass  from  the  south  sea  to  that  on  the  other  side,  and 
thus  shorten  the  route  by  more  than  fifteen  hundred 
leagues.  From  Panama  to  Magellan  would  constitute 
an  island,  and  from  Panama  to  Newfoundland  would 
constitute  another,  so  that  the  whole  of  America  would 
be  in  two  islands." 

He  had  also  made  one  expedition  to  the  St.  Lawrence, 
reaching  the  deserted  Hochelaga,  seeing  the  Lachine 
Rapids,  and  getting  vague  reports  of  the  unknown  West. 
He  must  have  been  back  in  Paris  in  time  to  see  the 
eleven  survivors  of  La  Roche's  unsuccessful  expedition 
of  1590,  who,  having  lived  twelve  years  and  more  on 
Sable  Island,  were  rescued  and  brought  before  King 
Henry  IV,  "standing  like  river  gods"  in  their  long 
beards   and   clad   in   shaggy   skins.     During  the  next 

1  For  an  interesting  account  of  Brouage  to-day,  see  "  Acadiensis,"  4  :  226. 

2  "Brief  Discours  des  Choses  plus  remarquables  que  Sammuel  Cham- 
plain  de  Brouage,  reconnues  aux  Indies  Occidentalles  au  voiage  qu'il  en  a 
faict  en  icelles  en  l'annee  VCIIIJIXXIX  (1599)  et  en  l'annee  VJCJ  (1601) 
comme  ensuite."     Now  in  English  translation  by  Hakluyt  Society,  1859. 

3  The  John  Carter  Brown  Library  at  Providence,  R.  I. 

*  Several  earlier  Spanish  suggestions  for  a  canal  had  been  made.  See 
M.  F.  Johnson,  "Four  Centuries  of  the  Panama  Canal." 


16  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

three  years  this  indefatigable,  resourceful  pioneer  as- 
sisted in  founding  Acadia  and  exploring  the  Atlantic 
coast  southward.  Boys  and  girls  in  America  are  fa- 
miliar with  the  story  of  the  dispersion  of  the  Aca- 
dians,  a  century  and  more  later,  as  preserved  in  our 
literature  by  the  poet  Longfellow.  But  doubtless  not 
one  in  a  hundred  thousand  has  ever  read  the  earlier 
chapters  of  that  iEneid. 

The  best  and  the  meanest  of  France  were  of  the 
company  that  set  out  from  Dieppe  to  be  its  colonists: 
men  of  highest  condition  and  character,  and  vagabonds, 
Catholic  priests  and  Huguenot  ministers,  soldiers  and 
artisans.  There  were  theological  discussions  which  led 
to  blows  before  the  colonists  were  far  at  sea.  Fiske, 
the  historian,  says  the  "ship's  atmosphere  grew  as 
musty  with  texts  and  as  acrid  with  quibbles  as  that  of 
a  room  at  the  Sorbonne."  There  was  the  incident  of 
the  wandering  of  Nicolas  Aubry,  "more  skilled  in  the 
devious  windings  of  the  [Latin  Quarter]  than  in  the 
intricacies  of  the  Acadian  Forest,"  where  he  was  lost 
for  sixteen  days  and  subsisted  on  berries  and  wild 
fruits;  there  was  the  ravage  of  the  relentless  maladie  de 
terre,  scurvy,  for  which  Cartier's  specific  could  not  be 
found  though  the  woods  were  scoured;  there  were  the 
explorations  of  beaches  and  harbors  and  islands  and 
rivers,  including  the  future  Massachusetts  Bay  and 
Plymouth,  and  the  accurate  mapping  of  all  that  coast 
now  so  familiar;  there  were  the  arrivals  of  the  ship 
Jonas,  once  with  temporal  supplies  and  again,  as  the 
Mayflower  of  the  Jesuits,  with  spiritual  teachers;  there 
was  the  "Order  of  Good  Times,"  which  flourished  with 
as  good  cheer  and  as  good  food  at  Port  Royal  in  the 
solitude   of    the  continent   as  the  gourmands   at  the 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES    17 

Rue  aux  Ours  had  in  Paris  and  that,  too,  at  a  cheaper 
rate;1  there  was  later  the  news  of  the  death  of  Henry  IV 
heard  from  a  fisherman  of  Newfoundland;  and  there 
was,  above  all  else  except  the  "indomitable  tenacity"  of 
Champlain,  the  unquenchable  enthusiasm,  lively  fancy, 
and  good  sense  of  Lescarbot,  the  verse-making  advo- 
cate from  Paris. 

There  is  so  much  of  tragic  suffering  and  gloom  in 
all  this  epic  of  the  forests  that  one  is  tempted  to  spend 
more  time  than  one  ought,  perhaps,  on  that  bit  of 
European  clearing  (the  only  spot,  save  one,  as  yet  in 
all  the  continent  north  of  Florida  and  Mexico),  in  the 
jolly  companionship  of  that  young  poet-lawyer  who  had 
doubtless  sat  under  lecturers  in  Paris  and  who  would 
certainly  have  been  quite  as  capable  and  entertaining 
as  any  lecturers  on  the  new  world  brought  in  these 
later  days  from  America  to  Paris,  a  man  "who  won  the 
good-will  of  all  and  spared  himself  naught,"  "who 
daily  invented  something  for  the  public  good,"  and 
who  gave  the  strongest  proof  of  what  advantage  "a 
new  settlement  might  derive  from  a  mind  cultivated 
by  study  and  induced  by  patriotism  to  use  its  knowl- 
edge and  reflections." 

It  cannot  seem  unworthy  of  the  serious  purpose  of 
this  book  to  let  the  continent  lie  a  few  minutes  longer 
in  its  savage  slumber,  or,  as  the  Jesuits  thought  it, 
"blasted  beneath  the  sceptre  of  hell,"  while  we  ac- 
company Poutrincourt  and  Champlain,  returning 
wounded    and    weather-beaten    from    inspecting    the 


1  "  Though  the  epicures  of  Paris  often  tell  us  we  have  no  Rue  aux  Ours 
over  there,  as  a  rule  we  made  as  good  cheer  as  we  could  have  in  this  same 
Rue  aux  Ours  and  at  less  cost."  Lescarbot,  "Champlain  Society  Publica- 
tion," 7  :  342. 


1 8  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

coast  of  New  England,  to  find  the  buildings  of  Port 
Royal,  under  Lescarbot's  care,  bright  with  lights,  and 
an  improvised  arch  bearing  the  arms  of  Poutrincourt 
and  De  Monts,  to  be  received  by  Neptune,  who,  ac- 
companied by  a  retinue  of  Tritons,  declaimed  Alexan- 
drine couplets  of  praise  and  welcome,  and  to  sit  at  the 
sumptuous  table  of  the  Order  of  Good  Times,  of  which 
I  have  just  spoken,  furnished  by  this  same  lawyer- 
poet's  agricultural  industry.  We  may  even  stop  a 
moment  longer  to  hear  his  stately  appeal  to  France, 
which,  heeded  by  her,  would  have  made  Lescarbot's  a 
name  familiar  in  the  homes  of  America  instead  of  one 
known  only  to  those  who  delve  in  libraries: 

"France,  fair  eye  of  the  universe,  nurse  from  old 
of  letters  and  of  arms,  resource  to  the  afflicted,  strong 
stay  to  the  Christian  religion,  Dear  Mother  .  .  .  your 
children,  our  fathers  and  predecessors,  have  of  old  been 
masters  of  the  sea.  .  .  .  They  have  with  great  power 
occupied  Asia.  .  .  .  They  have  carried  the  arms  and 
the  name  of  France  to  the  east  and  south.  .  .  .  All 
these  are  marks  of  your  greatness,  .  .  .  but  you  must 
now  enter  again  upon  old  paths,  in  so  far  as  they  have 
been  abandoned,  and  expand  the  bounds  of  your  piety, 
justice  and  humanity,  by  teaching  these  things  to  the 
nations  of  New  France.  .  .  .  Our  ancient  practice  of 
the  sea  must  be  revived,  we  must  ally  the  east  with 
the  west  and  convert  those  people  to  God  before  the 
end  of  the  world  come.  .  .  .  You  must  make  an  alli- 
ance in  imitation  of  the  course  of  the  sun,  for  as  he 
daily  carries  his  light  hence  to  New  France,  so  let  your 
civilization,  your  light,  be  carried  thither  by  your 
children,  who  henceforth,  by  the  frequent  voyages  they 
shall  make  to  these  western  lands,  shall  be  called  chil- 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES    19 

dren  of  the  sea,  which  is,  being  interpreted,  children 
of  the  west."  1 

"Children  of  the  west."  His  fervid  appeal  found  as 
little  response  then  as  doubtless  it  would  find  if  made 
to-day,  and  the  children  of  the  sea  were  interpreted 
as  the  children  of  the  south  of  Africa.  The  sons  of 
France  have  ever  loved  their  homes.  They  have,  except 
the  adventurous  few,  preferred  to  remain  children  of 
the  rivers  and  the  sea  of  their  fathers,  and  so  it  is 
that  few  of  Gallic  blood  were  "spawned,"  to  use  Les- 
carbot's  metaphor,  in  that  chill  continent,  though  the 
venturing  or  missionary  spirit  of  such  as  Cartier  and 
Champlain,  Poutrincourt  and  De  Monts  gave  spawn 
of  such  heroism  and  unselfish  sacrifice  as  have  made 
millions  in  America  whom  we  now  call  "children  of 
the  west,"  geographical  offspring  of  Brittany  and  Nor- 
mandy and  Picardy. 

The  lilies  of  France  and  the  escutcheons  of  De 
Monts  and  Poutrincourt,  painted  by  Lescarbot  for  the 
castle  in  the  wilderness,  faded;  the  sea  which  Lescarbot, 
as  Neptune,  impersonated  in  the  pageant  of  welcome, 
and  the  English  ships  received  back  those  who  had 
not  been  gathered  into  the  cemetery  on  land;  and  the 
first  agricultural  colony  in  the  northern  wilds  lapsed 
for  a  time  at  least  into  a  fur  traders'  station  or  a  place 
of  call  for  fishermen. 

It  was  only  by  locating  these  points  on  Champlain's 
map  of  Port  Royal  that  I  was  able  to  find  in  191 1  the 
site  of  the  ancient  fort,  garden,  fish-pond,  and  cemetery. 
The  men  unloading  a  schooner  a  few  rods  away  seemed 
not  to  know  of  Lescarbot  or  Poutrincourt  or  even 
Champlain,  but  that  was  perhaps  because  they  were 
not  accustomed  to  my  tongue. 

'Lescarbot,  "Histoire  de  la  Nouvelle  France,"  1618,  pp.  15-22. 


20    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  unquiet  Champlain  left  Acadia  in  the  summer 
of  1607,  the  charter  having  been  withdrawn  by  the 
king.  In  the  winter  of  1607-8  he  walked  the  streets 
of  Paris  as  in  a  dream,  we  are  told,  longing  for  the 
northern  wilderness,  where  he  had  left  his  heart  four 
years  before.  In  the  spring  of  1608  the  white  whales 
are  floundering  around  his  lonely  ship  in  the  river  of 
his  dreams.  At  the  foot  of  the  gray  rock  of  Quebec 
he  makes  the  beginning  of  a  fort,  whence  he  plans  to  go 
forth  to  trace  the  rivers  to  their  sources,  discover, 
perchance,  a  northern  route  to  the  Indies,  and  make  a 
path  for  the  priests  to  the  countless  savages  "in 
bondage  of  Satan."  Parkman  speaks  of  him  as  the 
"iEneas  of  a  destined  people,"  and  he  is  generally 
called  the  "father  of  Canada."  But  I  think  of  him 
rather  as  a  Prometheus  who,  after  his  years  of  bravest 
defiance  of  elements  and  Indians,  is  to  have  his  heart 
plucked  out  day  by  day,  chained  to  that  same  gray 
rock — only  that  death  instead  of  Herculean  succor 
came. 

There  is  space  for  only  the  briefest  recital  of  the 
exploits  and  endurances  of  the  stout  heart  and  hardy 
frame  of  the  man  of  whom  any  people  of  any  time 
might  well  be  proud.  The  founding  of  Quebec,  the 
rearing  of  the  pile  of  wooden  buildings  where  the 
lower  town  now  stretches  along  the  river;  the  unsuc- 
cessful plot  to  kill  Champlain  before  the  fort  is  fin- 
ished; the  death  of  all  of  the  twenty-eight  men  save 
eight  before  the  coming  of  the  first  spring — these  are 
the  incidents  of  the  first  chapter. 

The  visit  to  the  Iroquois  country;  the  discovery  of 
the  lake  that  bears  his  name;  the  first  portentous  col- 
lision with  the  Indians  of  the  Five  Nations,  under- 
taken to  keep  the  friendship  of  the  Indian  tribes  along 


FROM  LABRADOR  TO  THE  LAKES    21 

the  St.  Lawrence;  a  winter  in  France;  the  breaking 
of  ground  for  a  post  at  Montreal;  another  visit  to 
France  to  find  means  for  the  rescue  and  sustenance  of 
his  fading  colony,  make  a  depressing  second  chapter. 

Then  follows  the  journey  up  the  Ottawa  with  the 
young  De  Vignau,  who  had  stirred  Paris  by  claiming 
that  he  had  at  last  found  the  northwest  passage  to 
the  Pacific,  when  he  had  in  fact  spent  the  winter  in  an 
Indian  lodge  not  two  hundred  miles  from  Montreal;  the 
noble  forgiveness  of  De  Vignau  by  Champlain;  his 
crestfallen  return  and  his  going  forth  from  France 
again  in  161 5  with  four  Recollet  friars  (Franciscans  of 
the  strict  observance)  of  the  convent  of  his  birthplace 
(Brouage)  inflamed  by  him  with  holy  zeal  for  the  con- 
tinent of  savages.  For  a  little  these  "apostolic  mendi- 
cants" in  their  gray  robes  girt  with  the  white  cord, 
their  feet  naked  or  shod  in  wooden  sandals,  tarried 
beneath  the  gray  rock  and  then  set  forth  east,  north, 
and  west,  soon  (1626)  to  be  followed  and  reinforced 
by  their  brothers  of  stronger  resources,  the  Jesuits,  the 
"black  gowns,"  upon  a  mission  whose  story  is  as  mar- 
vellous as  a  "tale  of  chivalry  or  legends  of  lives  of  the 
saints." 

Meanwhile  Champlain,  exploring  the  regions  to  the 
northwest,  is  the  first  of  white  men  to  look  upon  the 
first  of  the  Great  Lakes — the  "Mer  Douce"  (Lake 
Huron)  being  discovered  before  the  lakes  to  the  south — 
the  first  after  the  boy  Etienne  Brule  and  Friar  Le 
Caron:  the  latter  having  gone  before  him,  celebrated 
the  first  mass  on  Champlain's  arrival  the  12th  of 
August,  161 5,  a  day  "marked  with  white  in  the  friar's 
calendar,"  and  deserving  to  be  marked  with  red  in 
the  calendar  of  the  west. 


22  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

There  follow  twenty  restless  years  in  which  Cham- 
plain's  efforts  are  divided  between  discovery  and 
strengthening  the  little  colony,  and  his  occupations 
between  holding  his  Indian  allies  who  lived  along  the 
northern  pathway  to  the  west,  fighting  their  enemies 
to  the  south,  the  Iroquois,  restraining  the  jealousies 
of  merchants  and  priests,  trade  and  missions,  reconcil- 
ing Catholics  and  Huguenots,  going  nearly  every  year 
to  France  in  the  interests  of  the  colony,  building  and 
repairing,  yielding  for  a  time  to  the  overpowering  ships 
of  the  English.  The  grizzled  soldier  and  explorer,  re- 
stored and  commissioned  anew  under  the  fostering  and 
firm  support  of  Richelieu,  struggled  to  the  very  end 
of  his  life  to  make  the  feeble  colony,  which  eighteen 
years  after  its  founding  "could  scarcely  be  said  to 
exist  but  in  the  founder's  brain,"  not  chiefly  an  agri- 
cultural settlement  but  a  spiritual  centre  from  which 
the  interior  was  to  be  explored  and  the  savage  hordes 
won — at  the  same  time  to  heaven  and  to  France — 
subdued  not  by  being  crushed  but  by  being  civilized, 
not  by  the  sword  but  by  the  cross.  It  was  a  far  dif- 
ferent colony  that  was  beginning  to  grow  fronting  the 
harbor  of  Plymouth,  where  men  quite  as  intolerant  of 
priests  as  Richelieu  was  intolerant  of  Huguenots  were 
building  homes  and  making  firesides  in  enjoyment  of 
religious  and  political  freedom. 

Champlain  lay  dying  as  the  year  1635  went  out, 
asking  more  help  from  his  patron  Richelieu,  but  his 
great  task  had  been  accomplished.  The  St.  Lawrence 
had  been  opened,  the  first  two  of  the  Great  Lakes  had 
been  reached,  and  explorer  and  priest  were  already  on 
the  edge  of  that  farther  valley  of  the  "Missipi,"  which 
we  are  to  enter  in  the  next  chapter. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  PATHS  OF  THE  GRAY  FRIARS  AND 
BLACK  GOWNS 

IT  was  exactly  a  hundred  years,  according  to 
some  authorities,  after  Jacques  Cartier  opened  and 
passed  through  the  door  of  the  St.  Lawrence  Valley 
that  another  son  of  France,  Jean  Nicolet,  again  the 
first  of  Europeans  so  far  as  is  now  certainly  known, 
looked  over  into  the  great  valley  of  the  Mississippi 
from  the  north. 

Champlain,  dying  beneath  the  Rock  of  Quebec,  had 
touched  two  of  the  Great  Lakes  twenty  years  before. 
He  never  knew  probably  that  another  of  those  immense 
inland  seas  lay  between,  though,  as  his  last  map  in- 
dicates, he  had  some  word  several  years  before  his 
death  of  a  greater  sea  beyond,  where  now  two  mighty 
lakes,  the  largest  bodies  of  fresh  water  on  the  globe, 
carry  their  sailless  fleets  and  nourish  the  life  of  mil- 
lions on  their  shores. 

From  the  coureurs  de  bois,  "runners  of  the  woods," 
whom  he,  tied  by  the  interests  of  his  feeble  colony  to 
the  Rock,  had  sent  out,  enviously  no  doubt,  upon 
journeys  of  exploration  and  arbitration  among  the 
Indians,  and  from  the  Gray  Friars  and  Black  Gowns 
who,  inflamed  of  his  spirit,  had  gone  forth  through  the 
solitudes  from  Indian  village  to  village,  from  suffer- 
ing to  suffering,  reports  had  come  which  he  must  have 

23 


24    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

been  frequently  translating  with  his  practised  hand 
into  river  and  shore  line  of  this  precious  map,  the 
original  of  which  is  still  kept  among  the  proud  archives 
of  France.  He  was  disappointed  the  while,  I  have  no 
doubt,  that  still  the  fresh  water  kept  flowing  from  the 
west,  and  that  still  there  was  no  word  of  the  salt  sea. 

The  straight  line  which  makes  the  western  border 
of  his  map  is  merciful  of  his  ignorance,  but  merciless 
of  his  hopes.  It  admits  no  stream  that  does  not  flow 
into  one  of  the  lakes  or  into  the  St.  Lawrence.  But 
it  was  made  probably  four  years  before  his  death  and 
it  is  possible,  indeed  probable,  that  just  before  paralysis 
came  upon  him,  he  had  heard  through  the  famous 
coureur  de  bois,  Jean  Nicolet,  whom  he  had  despatched 
the  year  previous,  of  a  river  which  this  man  of  the 
woods  had  descended  so  far  that  "in  three  days  more" 
he  would  have  reached  what  the  Indians  called  the 
"Great  Water."1  There  is  good  reason,  in  the  ap- 
pointment of  this  same  coureur  de  bois  as  a  commis- 
sioner and  interpreter  at  Three  Rivers,  for  thinking 
(as  one  wishes  to  think)  that  like  Moses,  Champlain  had, 
through  him  a  vision  of  the  valley  which  he  himself 
might  not  enter,  but  which  his  compatriots  were  to 
possess. 

The  historian  Bancroft  said  of  that  land:  "Not  a 
cape  was  turned,  not  a  river  entered,  but  a  Jesuit  led 
the  way."  But  the  men  of  sandalled  feet  had  not  yet 
penetrated  so  far  in  1635.  It  is  an  interesting  tribute 
to  these  spiritual  pioneers,  however,  that  the  particular 
rough  coureur  de  bois  who  first  looked  into  that  far 
valley  of  solitude,  inhabited  only  by  Indians  and  buf- 

1  The  Mississippi.  Nicolet  probably  did  not  go  beyond  the  Fox  portage. 
See  C.  W.  Butterfield,  "The  Discovery  of  the  Northwest  by  Jean  Nicolet." 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         25 

faloes  and  other  untamed  beasts,  would  doubtless  never 
have  left  his  Indian  habits  and  returned  to  civilization 
if  he  could  have  lived  without  the  sacraments  of  the 
church. 

This  coureur  de  bois  Nicolet  presents  a  grotesque 
appearance  as  he  mounts  the  rims  of  the  two  valleys 
where  the  two  bowls  touch  each  other,  bowls  so  full 
that  in  freshet  the  water  sometimes  overflows  the 
brim  and  makes  one  continuous  valley. 

Nicolet  would  not  be  recognized  for  the  Frenchman 
that  he  was,  as  he  appears  yonder;  for,  having  been 
told  that  the  men  whom  he  was  to  meet  were  without 
hair  upon  their  faces  and  heads,  and  thinking  himself 
to  be  near  the  confines  of  China,  he  had  attired  him- 
self as  one  about  to  be  received  at  an  Oriental  court. 
Accordingly,  he  stands  upon  the  edge  of  the  prairies  in 
a  robe  of  Chinese  damask  embroidered  with  flowers  and 
birds — but  with  a  pistol  in  each  hand.  Having  suc- 
ceeded in  his  mission  to  these  barbarians  (for  such  he 
found  them  to  be,  wearing  breech-clouts  instead  of 
robes  of  silk),  he  was  impelled  or  lured  over  into  the 
great  valley,  it  is  believed.  He  passed  from  the  lake 
on  the  border  of  Champlain's  map1  up  a  river  (the 
Fox)  that  by  and  by  became  but  a  stream  over  which 
one  might  jump.  He  portaged  from  this  stream  or 
creek  across  a  narrow  strip  of  prairie,  only  a  mile  wide, 
to  the  Wisconsin  River,  a  tributary  of  the  Mississippi. 
The  statement  over  which  I  have  pondered,  walking 
along  that  river,  that  he  might  have  reached  the  "great 
water"  in  three  more  days,  is  intelligible  only  in  this 
interpretation  of  his  course. 

The  next  Europeans  to  look  out  over  the  edge  of 

1  Lake  Michigan. 


26  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  basin  of  the  lakes  were  two  other  sons  of  France, 
one  a  man  of  St.  Malo,  Radisson,  a  voyageur  and  cou- 
reur  de  bois,  the  other  his  brother-in-law,  Groseilliers 
(1654).  It  is  thought  that  these  companions  went  all 
the  way  to  the  Mississippi  and  so  became  the  dis- 
coverers of  her  northern  waters.  The  journal  of  the 
voyage  is  unfortunately  somewhat  obscure.  The 
great  "rivers  that  divide  themselves  in  two"  are  many 
in  that  valley,  and  no  one  can  be  certain  of  the  identity 
of  that  river  "called  the  forked"  mentioned  in  the 
"relation"  of  Radisson,  which  had  "two  branches,  one 
towards  the  west,  the  other  towards  the  south,"  and, 
as  the  travellers  believed,  ran  toward  Mexico.1 

Then  came  the  Hooded  Faces,  the  friars  and  the 
priests.  To  the  four  Recollet  friars  whom  Champlain 
brought  out  with  him  in  161 5  from  the  convent  of  his 
native  town  (Brouage),  Jamay,  D'Olbeau,  Le  Caron, 
and  a  lay  brother,  Du  Plessis,  others  were  added,  but 
there  were  not  more  than  six  in  all  for  the  missions  ex- 
tending from  Acadia  to  where  Champlain  found  Le 
Caron  in  161 5  in  the  vicinity  of  Lake  Huron.  Their 
experiences  and  ardor  (not  unlike  those  of  other  mis- 
sionaries in  other  continents  and  in  our  own  times) 
have  illustration  in  this  extract  from  a  letter  written 
by  Le  Caron:  "It  would  be  difficult  to  tell  you  the 
fatigue  I  have  suffered,  having  been  obliged  to  have 
my  paddle  in  hand  all  day  long  and  row  with  all  my 
strength  with  the  Indians.  I  have  more  than  a  hun- 
dred times  walked  in  the  rivers  over  the  sharp  rocks, 
which  cut  my  feet,  in  the  mud,  in  the  woods,  where  I 

1  See  Warren  Upham.  Groseilliers  and  Radisson,  the  first  white  men  in 
Minnesota,  1655-6  and  1659-60,  and  their  discovery  of  the  Upper  Missis- 
sippi River,  in  Minn.  Historical  Society  Collections,  10  :  449-594. 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         27 

carried  the  canoe  and  my  little  baggage,  in  order  to 
avoid  the  rapids  and  frightful  waterfalls.  I  say  nothing 
of  the  painful  fast  which  beset  us,  having  only  a  little 
sagamity,  which  is  a  kind  of  pulmentum  composed  of 
water  and  the  meal  of  Indian  corn,  a  small  quantity 
of  which  is  dealt  out  to  us  morning  and  evening.  Yet 
I  must  avow  that  amid  my  pains  I  felt  much  consola- 
tion. For  alas !  when  we  see  such  a  great  number  of 
infidels,  and  nothing  but  a  drop  of  water  is  needed  to 
make  them  children  of  God,  one  feels  an  ardor  which  I 
cannot  express  to  labor  for  their  conversion  and  to 
sacrifice  for  it  one's  repose  and  life."1 

"Six  months  before  the  Pilgrims  began  their  meet- 
ing-house on  the  burial  hill  at  Plymouth,"  he  and  his 
brother  priests  laid  the  corner-stone  of  "the  earliest 
church  erected  in  French-America."  It  was  a  bitter 
disappointment  when,  in  1629,  he  was  carried  away  by 
the  English  from  his  infant  mission  to  spend  his  latter 
days  far  from  his  savage  converts,  perhaps  in  his  white- 
washed cell  in  the  convent  of  Brouage,  and  to  admin- 
ister before  an  altar  where  it  was  not  necessary  to  have 
neophytes  wave  green  boughs  to  drive  off  the  mos- 
quitoes— those  pestiferous  insects  from  whose  perse- 
cutions a  brother  Recollet  said  he  suffered  his  "worst 
martyrdom"  in  America.  But  more  bitter  chagrin 
was  in  store  for  Le  Caron,  for  when  the  French  re- 
turned to  Quebec,  in  1632,  after  the  restoration  under 
the  treaty,  the  Gray  Apostles  of  the  White  Cord  (who 
had  invited  the  Black  Gowns  to  join  them  in  their 
missions  years  before  and  had  so  hospitably  entertained 
them  when  denied  shelter  elsewhere  in  Quebec)  were 

'Le  Clercq,  "First  Establishment  of  the  Faith  in  New  France  (Shea)," 
1  :95- 


28  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

not  permitted  to  be  of  the  company.1  The  Jesuits 
went  alone.  Repairing  their  dilapidated  buildings  of 
Notre  Dame  des  Anges,  a  little  way  out  of  Quebec  on 
the  St.  Charles  River,  where  Cartier  had  spent  his 
first  miserable  winter  in  America,  they  began  their 
enterprises  ad  majorem  Dei  gloriam  in  a  field  of  labor 
whose  vastness  "might,"  as  Parkman  says,  "tire  the 
wings  of  thought  itself."  Le  Jeune  left  the  convent  at 
Dieppe,  De  Noue  that  at  Rouen,  and  they  went  out 
from  Havre  together  to  begin  their  labors  among  a 
people  whose  first  representatives  came  aboard  the 
vessel  at  Tadoussac  with  faces  variously  painted, 
black  and  red  and  yellow,  as  a  party  of  "carnival 
maskers."  One  cannot  well  conjecture  a  more  hopeless 
undertaking  than  that  of  making  those  half-naked, 
painted  barbarians  understand  the  mystery  of  the 
Trinity,  for  example,  or  the  significance  of  the  cross. 
Think  of  this  gentle,  holy  father,  Le  Jeune,  seated  in  a 
hovel  beside  one  of  these  savages,  whose  language  he  is 
trying  to  learn,  bribing  his  Indian  tutor  with  a  piece  of 
tobacco  at  every  difficulty  to  make  him  more  attentive, 
or  with  half-frozen  fingers  writing  his  Algonquin  exer- 
cises, or  making  translations  of  prayers  for  the  tongues 
of  his  prospective  converts — and  you  will  be  able  to 
appreciate  the  beginnings  of  the  task  to  which  these 
men  without  the  slightest  question  set  themselves. 

It  was  a  life,  once  these  men  left  the  mission  house 
of  Notre  Dame  des  Anges,  that  was  without  the  slight- 

1  Le  Caron,  says  Le  Clercq,  when  he  "saw  all  his  efforts  were  useless, 
experienced  the  same  fate  as  Saint  Francis  Xavier,  who  when  on  the  point 
of  entering  China,  found  so  many  secret  obstacles  to  his  pious  design  that 
he  fell  sick  and  died  of  chagrin.  So  was  Father  Joseph  a  martyr  to  the 
zeal  which  consumed  him,  and  of  that  ardent  charity  which  burned  in  his 
heart  to  visit  his  church  again." — Le  Clercq,  1.  c.  1 :  324. 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         29 

est  social  intercourse,  that  was  beyond  the  prizes  of 
any  earthly  ambition,  that  was  frequently  in  imminence 
of  torture  and  death,  and  that  was  usually  in  physical 
discomfort  if  not  in  pain.  Obscure  and  constant  toil 
for  tender  hands,  solitude,  suffering,  privation,  death — 
these  made  up  the  portion  of  the  messengers  of  the 
faith  who  turned  their  faces  toward  the  wilderness, 
their  steps  into  the  gloom  of  the  forests,  pathless  ex- 
cept for  the  traces  of  the  feet  of  savages  and  wild 
beasts. 

For  it  is  twenty-five  years  after  that  memorable 
day  when  Le  Caron  first  said  mass  on  the  shores  of 
one  of  the  Great  Lakes  (Champlain  being  present) 
before  the  farthermost  shore  of  the  farthest  lake  is 
reached  by  these  patient  and  valorous  pilgrims  of 
the  west.  The  story  of  that  heroic  journey,  of  the 
consecration  of  those  forests  and  waters  and  clearings 
by  suffering  and  unselfish  ministry,  fills  many  volumes 
(forty  in  the  French  edition  and  seventy-two  in  the 
edition  recently  published  in  the  United  States,  the 
English  translation  being  presented  on  the  pages  op- 
posite the  Latin  or  French  originals).  There  is  ma- 
terial in  them  for  many  chapters  of  a  new-world 
"Odyssey."  To  these  "  Relations,"  as  they  were  called, 
we  owe  the  great  body  of  information  we  have  con- 
cerning New  France,  from  1603  in  Acadia  to  the  early 
part  of  the  eighteenth  century  in  the  Mississippi  and 
St.  Lawrence  Valleys;  for  they  who  wrote  them  were 
not  priests  alone,  they  were  at  the  same  time  explorers, 
scientists,  historical  students,  ethnologists  (the  first 
and  best-fitted  students  of  the  North  American  Indian), 
physicians  to  the  bodies  as  well  as  ministers  to  the 
souls  of  those  wild  creatures. 


30  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

There  was  a  time  when  these  "Relations,"  as  they 
came  from  the  famous  press  of  Cramoisy,  were  eagerly 
awaited  and  devoured,  and  were  everywhere  the  themes 
of  enthusiastic  discussion  in  circles  of  high  devotion 
in  Paris  and  throughout  France,  where  it  is  doubtless 
believed  by  many  to-day  that  the  borders  of  the  lakes 
which  the  authors  of  these  "Relations"  traversed  are 
still  possessed  by  Indians,  or  at  best  by  half-civilized, 
half-barbaric  peoples  who  would  stand  agape  in  the 
Louvre  as  the  Goths  stood  before  the  temples  and  the 
statues  of  Rome. 

The  "Relations"  of  Jesuits  are  among  our  most 
precious  chronicles  in  America.  With  these  the  his- 
tory of  the  north — the  valleys  of  the  St.  Lawrence,  the 
Great  Lakes,  and  the  Mississippi — begins.  The 
coureurs  de  bois  may  have  anticipated  the  priests  in 
some  solitary  places,  but  they  seldom  made  records. 
Doubtless,  like  Nicolet,  they  told  their  stories  to  the 
priests  when  they  went  back  to  the  altars  for  sacra- 
ment, so  that  even  their  experiences  have  been  for  the 
most  part  preserved.  But  when  we  know  under  what 
distracting  and  discouraging  conditions  even  the  priest 
wrote,  we  wonder,  as  Thwaites  says,  that  anything 
whatever  has  been  preserved  in  writing.  The  "Rela- 
tions" were  written  by  the  fathers,  he  reminds  us,1  in 
Indian  camps,  the  aboriginal  insects  buzzing  or  crawl- 
ing about  them,  in  the  midst  of  a  chaos  of  distractions, 
immersed  in  scenes  of  squalor  and  degradation,  over- 
come by  fatigue  and  improper  sustenance,  suffering 
from  wounds  and  disease,  and  maltreated  by  their  hosts 
who  were  often  their  jailers.  What  they  wrote  under 
these  circumstances  is  simple  and  direct.    There  is  no 

1  "Jesuit  Relations,"  I  :  39,  40. 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         31 

florid  rhetoric;  there  is  little  self-glorification;  no  un- 
necessary dwelling  on  the  details  of  martyrdom;  and 
there  is  not  a  line  to  give  suspicion  "that  one  of  this 
loyal  band  flinched  or  hesitated." 

"I  know  not,"  says  one  of  these  apostles1  in  an 
epistle  to  the  Romans  (for  this  particular  letter  went 
to  Rome),  "I  know  not  whether  your  Paternity  will 
recognize  the  letter  of  a  poor  cripple,  who  formerly, 
when  in  perfect  health  was  well  known  to  you.  The 
letter  is  badly  written,  and  quite  soiled  because  in 
addition  to  other  inconveniences,  he  who  writes  it 
has  only  one  whole  finger  on  his  right  hand;  and  it  is 
difficult  to  avoid  staining  the  paper  with  the  blood 
which  flows  from  his  wounds,  not  yet  healed:  he  uses 
arquebus  powder  for  ink,  and  the  earth  for  a  table." 
This  particular  early  American  writer,  besides  having 
his  hand  split  and  now  one  finger-nail  or  joint  burned 
ofF  and  now  another,  his  hair  and  beard  pulled  out, 
his  flesh  burned  with  live  coals  and  red-hot  stones, 
was  hung  up  by  the  feet,  had  food  for  dogs  placed 
upon  his  body  that  they  might  lacerate  him  as  they 
ate,  but  finally  escaped  death  itself  through  sale  to 
the  Dutch. 

Two  other  chroniclers  of  that  life  of  which  they  were 
a  part,  were  two  men  of  noble  birth:  the  giant  Brebeuf, 
"the  Ajax  of  the  mission,"  a  man  of  vigorous  passions 
tamed  by  religion  (as  Parkman  says,  "a  dammed-up 
torrent  sluiced  and  guided  to  grind  and  saw  and  weave 
for  the  good  of  man");  and  in  marked  and  strange  con- 
trast with  him,  Charles  Gamier,  a  young  man  of 
thirty-three,  of  beardless  face — laughed  at  by  his 
friends  in  Paris,  we  are  told,  because  he  was  beardless 

1  Fr.  Francesco  Gioseppe  Bressani,  "Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  39  :  55. 


32  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

but  admired  by  the  Indians  for  the  same  reason — of  a 
delicate  nature  but  of  the  most  valiant  spirit. 

It  was  Brebeuf  who  kept  the  westernmost  outpost 
for  many  years.  A  man  of  iron  frame  and  resolute- 
ness, the  only  complaint  of  his  that  I  have  found,  is  one 
which  would  furnish  a  study  for  a  great  artist:  it  was 
that  he  had  "no  moment  to  read  his  breviary,  except 
by  moonlight  or  the  fire,  when  stretched  out  to  sleep 
on  a  bare  rock  by  some  savage  cataract, — or  in  a  damp 
nook  of  the  adjacent  forest."  There  is  another  pic- 
ture of  him  in  action,  crouched  in  a  canoe,  barefoot, 
toiling  at  the  paddle,  hour  after  hour,  day  after  day, 
week  after  week,  behind  the  lank  hair  and  brown 
shoulders  and  long,  naked  arms  of  his  aboriginal  com- 
panion. Still  another  simple  "Relation"  shows  him 
teaching  the  Huron  children  to  chant  and  repeat  the 
commandments  under  reward  of  beads,  raisins,  or 
prunes.  In  1637,  accused  of  having  bewitched  the 
Huron  nation  and  having  brought  famine  and  pest, 
he  was  doomed  to  death;  he  wrote  his  farewell  letter 
to  his  superior,  gave  his  farewell  dinner  to  his  enemies, 
taking  that  opportunity  to  preach  a  farewell  sermon 
concerning  the  Trinity,  heaven  and  hell,  angels  and 
fiends — the  only  real  things  to  him — and  so  wrought 
upon  his  guests  that  he  was  spared  to  labor  on,  though 
often  in  peril,  until  the  Iroquois  (1649),  still  following 
the  Hurons,  found  him  with  a  brother  priest  giving 
baptism  and  absolution  to  the  savages  dying  in  that 
last  struggle  this  side  of  the  Lakes  against  their  ancient 
enemies.  They  tied  him  to  a  stake,  hung  a  collar  of 
"hatchets  heated  red-hot"  about  his  neck,  baptized 
him  with  boiling  water,  cut  strips  of  flesh  from  his 
limbs,  drank  his  blood  as  if  to  inherit  of  his  valiance, 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         33 

and  finally  tore  out  and  ate  his  heart  for  supreme  cour- 
age. Such  cannibalism  seems  poetically  justifiable  in 
tribute  to  such  unflinching  constancy  of  devotion. 

His  brother  priest,  Lalemant,  who  was  tortured  to 
death  at  the  same  time,  had  thought  it  no  good  omen 
ten  years  before  (1639)  that  no  martyr's  blood  had  yet 
furnished  seed  for  the  church  in  that  new  soil,  though 
consoling  himself  with  the  thought  that  the  daily  life 
amid  abuse  and  threats,  smoke,  fleas,  filth,  and  dogs 
might  be  "accepted  as  a  living  martyrdom."  There 
was  ample  seed  by  now,  and  still  more  was  soon  to  be 
added,  for  very  soon,  the  same  year,  the  gentle  Gamier 
is  to  die  the  same  death  ministering  to  these  same 
Hurons,  whose  refugees,  flying  beyond  two  lakes  to 
escape  from  their  murderous  foes,  are  to  lure  the  priests 
on  still  farther  westward  till,  even  in  their  unmundane 
thoughts,  the  great,  mysterious  river  begins  to  flow 
toward  a  longed-for  sea. 

It  was  by  such  a  path  of  danger  and  suffering,  a 
path  which  threads  gloomy  forests,  that  the  first 
figures  clad  in  black  gowns  came  and  peered  over  the 
edge  of  the  valley  of  this  mysterious  stream,  even  be- 
fore Radisson  and  Groseilliers  wandered  in  that  wooded 
and  wet  and  fertile  peninsula  which,  beginning  at  the 
junction  of  three  lakes,  widens  to  include  the  whole 
northwest  of  what  is  now  the  United  States.  You  may 
travel  in  a  day  and  a  night  now  up  the  Ottawa  River, 
above  Lake  Nipissing,  around  Huron  to  the  point  of 
that  peninsula,  from  Montreal,  and  if  you  go  in  the 
season  of  the  year  in  which  I  once  made  the  journey 
you  will  find  this  path  (the  path  on  which  Champlain 
came  near  losing  his  life,  where  Recollet  and  Jesuit, 
coureur  de   bois    and   soldier   toiled   up    hundreds   of 


34  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

portages)  bordered  as  a  garden  path  much  of  the  way 
by  wild  purple  flowers  (that  doubtless  grew  red  in  the 
blood-sodden  ground  of  the  old  Huron  country),  with 
here  and  there  patches  of  gold. 

The  first  of  these  was  Father  Raymbault  and  with  him 
Father  Isaac  Jogues,  who  was  later  to  knock  with  mu- 
tilated hands  for  shelter  at  the  Jesuit  college  in  Rennes. 
Jogues  was  born  at  Orleans;  he  was  of  as  delicate  mould 
as  Gamier,  modest  and  refined,  but  "so  active  that  none 
of  the  Indians  could  surpass  him  in  running."  In  the 
autumn  of  1641  he  stood  with  his  companion  at  the 
end  of  the  peninsula  between  the  Lakes,  their  congre- 
gation to  the  number  of  two  thousand  having  been 
gathered  for  them  from  all  along  the  southern  shore 
of  Lake  Superior,  the  land  of  the  Chippewas.  Father 
Raymbault  died  at  Quebec  from  exposure  and  hardship 
encountered  here,  the  first  of  the  Christian  martyrs 
on  that  field,  and  Jogues  was  soon  after  sent  upon  an 
errand  of  greater  peril.  While  on  his  way  from  Quebec 
to  the  new  field  (the  old  Huron  station)  with  wine  for 
the  eucharist,  writing  materials,  and  other  spiritual  and 
temporal  supplies,  he  was  captured  by  the  Iroquois 
and  with  his  companions  subjected  to  such  torture  as 
even  Brebeuf  was  not  to  know.  Journeying  from  the 
place  of  his  capture  on  the  St.  Lawrence  to  that  of  his 
protracted  torture  he,  first  of  white  men,  saw  the  Lake 
Como  of  America  which  bears  the  name  of  "George," 
a  king  of  England,  instead  of  "Jogues,"  whom  the  holy 
church  may  honor  with  canonization,  but  who  should 
rather  be  canonized  by  the  hills  and  waters  where  he 
suffered.  His  fingers  were  lacerated  by  the  savages 
before  the  journey  was  begun;  up  the  Richelieu  River 
he  went,  suffering  from  his  wounds  and  "the  clouds  of 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         35 

mosquitoes."  At  the  south  end  of  Lake  Champlain 
this  gentle  son  of  France  was  again  subjected  to  spe- 
cial tortures  for  the  gratification  of  another  band  of 
Iroquois;  his  hands  were  mangled,  his  body  burned  and 
beaten  till  he  fell  "drenched  in  blood."  Where  thou- 
sands now  land  every  summer  at  the  head  of  Lake 
George  for  pleasure  he  staggered  forth  under  his  por- 
tage burden  to  the  shores  of  the  Mohawk,  where  again 
the  chief  called  the  crowd  to  "caress"  the  Frenchmen 
with  knives  and  other  instruments  of  torture,  the  chil- 
dren imitating  the  barbarity  of  their  elders.  I  should 
not  repeat  such  details  of  this  horrible  story  here  ex- 
cept to  give  background  to  one  moment's  act  in  the 
midst  of  it  all,  illustrative  of  the  motive  which  was 
back  of  this  unexampled  endurance.  While  he  and  his 
companions  were  on  the  scaffold  of  torture,  four  Huron 
prisoners  were  brought  in  and  put  beside  the  French- 
men: whereupon  Father  Jogues  began  his  ministry 
anew,  for  when  an  ear  of  green  corn  was  thrown  him 
for  food,  discovering  a  few  rain-drops  clinging  to  the 
husks,  he  secretly  baptized  two  of  his  eleventh-hour 
converts. 

This  was  not  the  end,  but  after  months  of  pain  and 
privation,  which  make  one  wonder  at  what  a  frail 
body,  fitted  with  a  delicate  organism,  can  endure,  he 
escaped  by  the  aid  of  the  Dutch  at  Fort  Orange  (now 
the  capital  of  the  State  of  New  York),  whither  the 
Iroquois  had  gone  to  trade,  and  after  six  weeks  in 
hiding  there,  was  sent  to  New  Amsterdam — then  a 
"delapidated  fort  garrisoned  by  sixty  soldiers"  and  a 
village  of  only  four  or  five  hundred  inhabitants,  but 
even  at  that  time  so  cosmopolitan  that,  as  one  of 
my  friends  who  has  recently  revived  a  census  of  that 


36  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

day  shows,  nearly  twenty  different  languages  were 
spoken. 

It  is  thus  that  a  little  French  father  of  the  wilder- 
ness comes  from  a  thousand  miles  behind  the  moun- 
tains, from  the  shores  of  the  farthest  lake,  in  the  mid- 
dle of  the  continent,  at  a  time  when  New  York  and 
Boston  had  together  scarcely  more  inhabitants  than 
would  fill  a  hall  in  the  Sorbonne. 

If  only  Richelieu  (who  died  in  the  very  year  that 
Jogues  was  exemplifying  so  faithfully  the  teaching  of 
Him  whose  brother  he  called  himself)  had  permitted 
the  Huguenot  who  wanted  to  go,  to  follow  this  little 
priest  into  those  wilds,  instead  of  trying  in  vain  to 
persuade  those  to  go  who  would  not,  who  shall  say  that 
American  visitors  from  that  far  interior  might  not 
be  speaking  to-day  in  a  tongue  which  Richelieu,  were 
he  alive,  could  best  understand. 

The  little  father,  who  has  always  seemed  to  me  an 
old  man,  though  he  was  then  only  thirty-six,  was 
carried  back  to  England,  suffering  from  nature  and 
pirates  almost  as  much  as  from  the  Iroquois,  and  at 
last  reached  Rennes,  where,  after  his  identity  was  dis- 
closed, the  night  was  given  to  jubilation  and  thanks- 
giving, we  are  told.  He  was  summoned  to  Paris,  where 
the  queen  "kissed  his  mutilated  hands"  and  exclaimed: 
"People  write  romances  for  us — but  was  there  ever  a 
romance  like  this,  and  it  is  all  true?"  Others  gladly 
did  him  honor.  But  all  this  gave  no  satisfaction  to 
his  soul  bent  upon  one  task,  and  as  soon  as  the  Pope,  at 
the  request  of  his  friends,  granted  a  special  dispensation1 
which  permitted  him,  though  deformed  by  the  "teeth 

'The   answer  of  Pope  Urban  VIII   was:    "Indignum  esset  martyrem 
Christi,  Christi  non  bibere  sanguinem." 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         37 

and  knives  of  the  Iroquois,"  to  say  mass  once  more,  he 
returned  to  the  wilderness  where  within  a  few  months 
the  martyrdom  was  complete  and  his  head  was  dis- 
played from  the  palisades  of  a  Mohawk  town. 

So  vanished  the  face  of  the  first  priest  of  France 
from  the  edge  of  the  great  valley,  he,  too,  as  Raym- 
bault,  perhaps,  hoping  "to  reach  China  across  the 
wilderness"  but  finding  his  path  "diverted  to  heaven." 

It  was  not  until  1660  that  another  came  into  that 
peninsula  at  whose  point  Jogues  had  preached,  the 
aged  Menard,  who  after  days  among  the  tangled 
swamps  of  northern  Wisconsin  was  lost,  and  only  his 
cassock,  breviary,  and  kettle  were  ever  recovered.  A 
little  later  came  Allouez  and  Dablon,  and  Druilletes 
who  had  been  entertained  at  Boston  by  Winslow  and 
Bradford  and  Dudley  and  John  Eliot,  and  last  of  those 
to  be  selected  from  the  increasing  number  of  that 
brotherhood  for  mention,  the  young  Pere  Marquette, 
"son  of  an  old  and  honorable  family  at  Laon,"  of 
extraordinary  talents  as  a  linguist  (having  learned,  as 
Parkman  tells  us,  to  speak  with  ease  six  Indian  lan- 
guages) and  in  devotion  the  "counterpart  of  Gamier 
and  Jogues."  When  he  first  appears  in  the  west  it  is 
at  the  mission  of  Pointe  de  St.  Esprit,  near  the  very 
western  end  of  Lake  Superior.  There  he  heard,  from 
the  Illinois  who  yearly  visited  his  mission,  of  the  great 
river  they  had  crossed  on  their  way,  and  from  the 
Sioux,  who  lived  upon  its  banks,  "of  its  marvels." 
His  desire  to  follow  its  course  would  seem  to  have  been 
greater  than  his  interest  in  the  more  spiritual  ends  of 
his  mission,  for  he  disappointedly,  it  is  intimated,  fol- 
lowed his  little  Huron  flock  suddenly  driven  back 
toward  the  east  by  the  Iroquois   of  the  West — the 


38  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Sioux.  At  Point  St.  Ignace,  a  place  midway  between 
the  two  perils,  the  Sioux  of  the  West  and  the  Iroquois 
of  the  East,  they  huddled  under  his  ministry. 

It  was  there  in  the  midst  of  his  labors  among  his 
refugees,  that  Louis  Joliet,  the  son  of  a  wagon-maker  of 
Quebec,  a  grandson  of  France,  found  him  on  the  day, 
as  he  writes  in  his  journal,  of  "the  Immaculate  Con- 
ception of  the  Holy  Virgin,  whom  I  had  continually 
invoked  since  I  came  to  this  country  of  the  Ottawas 
to  obtain  from  God  the  favor  of  being  enabled  to  visit 
the  Nations  on  the  river  Missisipi."  Joliet  carried 
orders  from  Frontenac  the  governor  and  Talon  the 
intendant,  that  Marquette  should  join  him — or  he  Mar- 
quette— upon  this  voyage  of  discovery,  so  consonant 
with  Marquette's  desire  for  divine  ordering.  Mar- 
quette quieted  his  morbid  conscience,  which  must  have 
reproved  his  exploring  ambitions,  by  reflecting  upon 
the  "happy  necessity  of  exposing  his  life"  for  the  sal- 
vation of  all  the  tribes  upon  that  particular  river,  and 
especially,  he  adds,  as  if  to  silence  any  possible  linger- 
ing remonstrance,  "the  Illinois,  who  when  I  was  at 
St.  Esprit,  had  begged  me  very  earnestly  to  bring  the 
Word  of  God  among  them." 

So  the  learned  son  of  Laon  and  the  practical  son  of 
the  wagon-maker  of  Quebec  set  out  westward  upon 
their  journey  under  the  protection  of  Marquette's 
particular  divinity,  but  provided  by  Joliet  with  sup- 
plies of  smoked  meat  and  Indian  corn,  and  furnished 
with  a  map  of  their  proposed  route  made  up  from 
rather  hazy  Indian  data.  Through  the  strait  that  leads 
into  Lake  Michigan,  and  along  the  shores  of  this 
wonderful  western  sea  they  crept,  stopping  at  night 
for  bivouac  on  shore;  then  up  Green  Bay  to  the  old 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         39 

mission;  and  then  up  the  Fox  River,  where  Nicolet  had 
gone,  in  his  love  not  of  souls  but  of  mere  adventure. 
What  interests  one  who  has  lived  in  that  region,  is  to 
hear  the  first  word  of  praise  of  the  prairies  extending 
farther  than  the  eye  can  see,  interspersed  with  groves 
or  with  lofty  trees.1 

I  have  spoken  of  the  little  river,  dwindling  into  a 
creek  of  perplexed  channel  before  the  trail  is  found 
that  ties  the  two  great  valleys  together.  One  cannot 
miss  it  now,  for  when  I  last  passed  over  it  it  was  being 
paved,  or  macadamized,  and  a  steam-roller  was  doing 
in  a  few  days  what  the  moccasined  or  sandalled  feet 
of  the  first  travellers  there  would  not  have  accom- 
plished in  a  thousand  thousand  years.  I  shall  speak 
later  of  what  has  grown  upon  this  narrow  isthmus 
(now  crossed  not  merely  by  trail  and  highway,  but 
by  canal  as  well),  but  I  now  must  hasten  on  where 
the  impatient  priest  and  his  sturdy,  practical  compan- 
ion are  leading,  toward  the  Wisconsin. 

Nicolet  may  have  put  his  boat  in  this  same  Wiscon- 
sin River,  but  if  he  did  he  did  not  go  far  below  th#e 
portage.  La  Salle  may  even  have  walked  over  this 
very  path  only  a  year  or  two  before.  But,  after  all,  it 
is  only  a  question  as  to  which  son  of  France  it  was,  for 
we  know  of  a  certainty  that  on  a  day  in  June  of  1673 
Joliet  and  Marquette  did  let  their  canoes  yield  to 
the  current  of  this  broad,  tranquil  stream  after  their 
days  of  paddling  up  the  "stream  of  the  wild  rice." 

I  have  walked  in  the  wide  valley  of  the  Wisconsin 
River  and  have  seen  through  the  haze  of  an  Indian 
summer  day  the  same  dim  bluffs  that  Marquette 
looked  upon,  and  by  night  the  light  of  the  same  stars 

^'Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  59  :  103. 


40  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

that  Marquette  saw  reflected  from  its  surface.  But 
having  never  ridden  upon  its  waters,  I  take  the  de- 
scription of  one  who  has  followed  its  course  more  in- 
timately if  not  more  worshipfully.  "They  glided  down 
the  stream,"  he  writes,  "by  islands  choked  with  trees 
and  matted  with  entangling  grape-vines,  by  forests, 
groves  and  prairies,  the  parks  and  pleasure-grounds  of 
a  prodigal  nature;  by  thickets  and  marshes  and  broad 
bare  sand-bars;  under  the  shadowing  trees  between 
whose  tops  looked  down  from  afar  the  bold  brow  of 
some  woody  bluff.  At  night,  the  bivouac,  the  canoes 
inverted  on  the  bank,  the  flickering  fire,  the  meal  of 
bison-flesh  or  venison,  the  evening  pipes,  and  slumber 
beneath  the  stars;  and  when  in  the  morning  they  em- 
barked again,  the  mist  hung  on  the  river  like  a  bridal 
veil,  then  melted  before  the  sun,  till  the  glassy  water 
and  the  languid  woods  basked  breathless  in  the  sultry 
glare."1 

But  to  those  first  voyagers  it  had  a  charm,  a  lure 
which  was  not  of  stars  or  shadows  or  wooded  bluffs 
or  companionable  bivouac.  It  led  to  the  great  and 
the  unknown  river,  which  in  turn  led  to  a  sea  remote 
from  that  by  which  the  French  had  come  out  of  Europe 
into  America.  They  were  travelling  over  the  edge  of 
Champlain's  map,  away  from  Europe,  away  from 
Canada,  away  from  the  Great  Lakes.  As  far  as  that 
trail  which  led  through  the  grass  and  reeds  up  from 
the  Fox,  one  might  have  come  every  league  of  the  way 
from  Havre  or  even  from  a  quay  of  the  Seine,  by  water, 
except  for  a  few  paces  of  portage  at  La  Chine  and  at 
Niagara.  But  that  narrow  strip  of  prairie  which  they 
crossed  that  June  day  in  1673  was  in  a  sense  the  coast 

1Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  pp.  63  and  64. 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         41 

of  a  new  sea,  they  knew  not  what  sea — or,  better,  it  was 
the  rim  of  a  new  world. 

On  the  17th  of  June  they  entered  the  Mississippi 
with  a  joy  which  they  could  not  express,  Marquette 
naming  it,  according  to  his  vow,  in  honor  of  the  Virgin 
Mary,  Riviere  de  la  Conception,  and  Joliet,  with  an 
earthly  diplomacy  or  gratitude,  in  honor  of  Frontenac, 
"La  Buade."  For  days  they  follow  its  mighty  cur- 
rent southward  through  the  land  of  the  buffalo,  but 
without  sight  for  sixty  leagues  of  a  human  being, 
where  now  its  banks  are  lined  with  farms,  villages,  and 
towns.  At  last  they  come  upon  footprints  of  men,  and 
following  them  up  from  the  river  they  enter  a  beauti- 
ful prairie  where  a  little  way  back  from  the  river  lay 
three  Indian  villages.  There,  after  peaceful  cere- 
monies and  salutations,  they,  the  first  Frenchmen  on 
the  farther  bank,  their  fame  having  been  carried  west- 
ward from  the  missions  on  the  shores  of  the  lakes,  were 
received. 

"I  thank  thee,"  said  the  sachem  of  the  Illinois, 
addressing  them;  "I  thank  thee,  Black  Gown,  and  thee, 

0  frenchman,"  addressing  himself  to  Monsieur  Jollyet, 
"for  having  taken  so  much  trouble  to  come  to  visit 
us.  Never  has  the  earth  been  so  beautiful,  or  the  sun 
so  Bright,  as  to-day;  Never  has  our  river  been  so  Calm, 
or  so  clear  of  rocks,  which  your  canoes  have  Removed 
in  passing;  never  has  our  tobacco  tasted  so  good,  or 
our  corn  appeared  so  fine,  as  We  now  see  Them.  Here 
is  my  son,  whom  I  give  thee  to  Show  thee  my  Heart. 

1  beg  thee  to  have  pity  on  me,  and  on  all  my  Nation. 
It  is  thou  who  Knowest  the  great  Spirit  who  has  made 
us  all.  It  is  thou  who  speakest  to  Him,  and  who 
hearest  his  word.    Beg  Him  to  give  me  life  and  health, 


42    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

and  to  come  and  dwell  with  us,  in  order  to  make  us 
Know  him."1 

Knowing  the  linguistic  attainments  of  Marquette 
and  his  sincerity,  one  must  credit  this  first  example  of 
eloquence  and  poetry  of  the  western  Indians,  cultivated 
of  life  amid  the  elemental  forces  of  the  water,  earth, 
and  sky.2  A  beautiful  earth,  sprinkled  with  flowers,  a 
bright  sun,  a  calm  river  free  of  rocks,  sweet-flavored 
tobacco,  thriving  corn,  an  acquaintance  with  the  Great 
Spirit — well  might  the  old  man  who  received  the  French 
man  say:  "thou  shalt  enter  all  our  cabins  in  peace." 

Indian  eloquence  is  not  of  the  lips  only.  It  is  a 
poor  Indian  speech  indeed  that  is  not  punctuated  by 
gifts.  And  so  it  was  that  the  French  travellers  resumed 
their  journey  laden  with  presents  from  their  prairie 
hosts,  and  a  slave  to  guide  them,  and  a  calumet  to 
procure  peace  wherever  they  went. 

It  is  enough  now,  perhaps,  to  know  that  the  voyag- 
ers passed  the  mouth  of  the  Illinois,  the  Missouri,  the 
Ohio,  and  reached  the  mouth  of  the  Arkansas,  when 
thinking  themselves  near  the  gulf  and  fearing  that 
they  might  fall  into  the  hands  of  the  Spaniards  if  they 
ventured  too  near  the  sea,  and  so  be  robbed  of  the  fruits 
of  their  expedition,  they  turned  their  canoes  up-stream. 
Instead,  however,  of  following  their  old  course  they 
entered  the  Illinois  River,  known  sometimes  as  the 
"Divine  River."  I  borrow  the  observing  father's 
description  of  that  particular  valley  as  it  was  just 
two  centuries  before  I  first  remember  seeing  it.  "We 
have  seen  nothing  like  this  river  for  the  fertility  of  the 

1  Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  59  :  121. 

s  It  was  of  these  same  prairies,  rivers,  and  skies,  these  same  elemental 
ever-present  forces,  that  Abraham  Lincoln  learned  the  simple,  rugged  elo- 
quence that  made  him  the  most  powerful  soul  that  valley  has  known. 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         43 

land,  its  prairies,  woods,  wild  cattle,  stag,  deer,  wild- 
cats, bustards,  swans,  ducks,  parrots,  and  even  beaver; 
its  many  little  lakes  and  rivers."1  Through  this  para- 
dise of  plenty  they  passed,  up  one  of  the  branches 
of  the  Illinois,  till  within  a  few  miles  of  Lake  Mich- 
igan, where  they  portaged  a  thousand  paces  to  a 
creek  that  emptied  into  the  lake  of  the  Illinois.  If 
they  were  following  that  portage  path  and  creek  to- 
day they  would  be  led  through  that  city  which  stands 
next  to  Paris  in  population — the  city  of  Chicago,  in 
the  commonwealth  that  bears  the  name  of  the  land 
through  which  the  French  voyagers  passed,  "Il- 
linois." 

At  the  end  of  September,  having  been  absent  four 
months,  and  having  paddled  their  canoes  over  twenty- 
five  hundred  miles,  they  reached  Green  Bay  again. 
There  these  two  pioneers,  companions  forever  in  the 
history  of  the  new  world,  separated — Joliet  to  bear 
the  report  of  the  discovery  of  the  Riviere  de  Buade  to 
Count  Frontenac,  Marquette  to  continue  his  devotions 
to  his  divinity  and  recruit  his  wasted  strength,  that  he 
might  keep  his  promise  to  return  to  minister  to  the 
Illinois,  whom  he  speaks  of  as  the  most  promising  of 
tribes,  for  "to  say  'Illinois'  is  in  their  language  to  say 
'the  men.'  " 

By  most  unhappy  fate  Joliet's  canoe  was  upset  in 
the  Lachine  Rapids,  when  almost  within  sight  of  Mon- 
treal, and  all  his  papers,  including  his  precious  map, 
were  lost  in  the  foam.  But  several  maps  were  made 
under  his  direction  or  upon  his  data. 

Marquette's  map,  showing  nothing  but  their  course 

1  B.  F.  French,  "Historical  Collections  of  Louisiana,"  4:51.  "Jesuit 
Relations"  (Thwaites),  59  :  161. 


44    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

and  supplying  nothing  from  conjecture,  was  found 
nearly  two  hundred  years  later  in  St.  Mary's  College 
in  Montreal,  furnishing,  I  have  thought,  a  theme  and 
design  for  a  mural  painting  in  the  interesting  halls  of 
the  Sorbonne,  where  so  many  periods,  personages,  and 
incidents  of  the  world's  history  are  worthily  remem- 
bered. The  art  of  that  valley  has  sought  to  reproduce 
or  idealize  the  faces  of  these  pioneers.  The  more  elo- 
quent, visible  memorial  would  be  the  crude  map  from 
the  hand  of  the  priest  Jacques  Marquette,  son  of  Rose 
de  la  Salle  of  the  royal  city  of  Rheims. 

Of  his  setting  out  again  for  the  Illinois,  where  he 
purposed  establishing  a  mission,  of  his  spending  the 
winter,  ill,  in  a  hut  on  the  Chicago  portage  path,  of  his 
brief  visit  to  the  Illinois,  of  his  journey  northward,  of 
his  death  by  the  way,  and  of  the  Indian  procession 
that  bore  his  bones  up  the  lake  to  Point  St.  Ignace — of 
all  this  I  may  not  speak  in  this  chapter. 

Here  let  me  say  only  the  word  of  tribute  that  comes 
to  him  out  of  his  own  time,  as  the  first  stories  of  his- 
tory came,  being  handed  down  from  generation  to 
generation  by  word  of  mouth,  till  a  poet  or  a  historian 
should  make  them  immortal.  The  story  of  Marquette 
I  had  known  for  many  years  from  the  blind  Parkman, 
but  not  long  ago  I  met  one  day  an  Indian  boy,  with 
some  French  blood  of  the  far  past  in  his  veins,  the  son 
of  a  Chippewa  chief,  a  youth  who  had  never  read 
Parkman  or  Winsor  but  who  knew  the  story  of  Mar- 
quette better  than  I,  for  his  grandmother  had  told 
him  what  she  had  heard  from  her  grandmother,  and 
she  in  turn  from  her  mother  or  grandmother,  of  lis- 
tening to  Marquette  speak  upon  the  shores  of  Supe- 
rior, of  going  with  other  French  and  Indians  on  that 


GRAY  FRIARS  AND  BLACK  GOWNS         45 

missionary  journey  to  the  Illinois  to  prepare  food  for 
him,  and  of  hearing  the  mourning  among  the  Indians 
when  long  after  his  death  the  report  of  his  end  reached 
their  lodges. 

The  grim  story  of  the  labors  of  the  followers  of 
Loyola  among  the  Indians  has  its  beatific  culmination 
in  the  life  of  this  zealot  and  explorer.  Pestilence  and 
the  Iroquois  had  ruined  all  the  hopes  of  the  Jesuits  in 
the  east.  Their  savage  flocks  were  scattered,  annihi- 
lated, driven  farther  in  the  fastnesses,  or  exiled  upon 
islands.  The  shepherds  who  vainly  followed  their 
vanishing  numbers  found  themselves  out  upon  the 
edge  of  a  new  field.  If  the  Iroquois  east  and  west 
could  have  been  curbed,  the  Jesuits  would  have  be- 
come masters  of  that  field  and  all  the  north.  We  shall, 
thinking  of  that  contingency,  take  varying  views,  be- 
yond reconciliation,  as  to  the  place  of  the  Iroquois 
in  American  history;  but  we  shall  all  agree,  whatever 
our  religious  and  political  predilection,  men  of  Old 
France  and  men  of  New  France  alike,  in  applauding 
the  sublime  disinterestedness,  fearless  zeal,  and  un- 
questioned devotion  to  something  beyond  the  self, 
which  have  consecrated  all  that  valley  of  the  Lakes  and 
have,  in  the  person  of  Marquette,  the  son  of  Laon,  made 
first  claim  upon  the  life  of  the  valley,  whose  great  water 
he  helped  to  discover. 


CHAPTER  IV 
FROM  THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF 

P£RE  MARQUETTE  was  still  in  a  convent  in 
Rheims  when  a  French  wood-ranger  and  fur 
trader  was  out  in  those  western  forests  making 
friends  for  the  French,  one  Sieur  Nicolas  Perrot,  who 
would  doubtless  have  been  forgotten  with  many  an- 
other of  his  craft  if  he  had  not  been  able — as  few  of 
them  were — to  read  and  write.  And  Marquette  was 
but  on  his  way  from  France  to  Canada  when  Sieur 
Perrot  was  ministering  with  beads  and  knives  and 
hatchets  and  weapons  of  iron  to  these  stone-age  men 
on  the  southern  shore  of  Superior,  where  the  priest 
was  later  to  minister  with  baptismal  water  and  mys- 
terious emblems.  It  was  Perrot,  whom  they  would 
often  have  worshipped  as  a  god,  who  prepared  the 
way  for  the  altars  of  the  priests  and  the  forts  of  the 
captains;  for  back  of  the  priests  there  were  coming 
the  brilliantly  clad  figures  of  the  king's  representa- 
tives. Once  when  Perrot  was  receiving  such  adoration, 
he  told  the  simple-minded  worshippers  that  he  was 
"only  a  Frenchman,  that  the  real  Spirit  who  had  made 
all,  had  given  the  French  the  knowledge  of  iron  and 
the  ability  to  handle  it  as  if  it  were  paste";  that  out 
of  "pity  for  His  creatures  He  had  permitted  the  French 
nation  to  settle  in  their  country."1    At  another  time  he 

'Emma  H.  Blair,  "Indian  Tribes  of  the  Upper  Mississippi  Valley," 
i  :  310. 

46 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    47 

said:  "I  am  the  dawn  of  that  light,  which  is  beginning 
to  appear  in  your  lands,"  and  having  learned  by  ex- 
perience the  true  Indian  eloquence,  he  proceeded  in  his 
oration  with  most  impressive  pauses:  "It  is  for  these 
young  men  I  leave  my  gun,  which  they  must  regard 
as  the  pledge  of  my  esteem  for  their  valor.  They 
must  use  it  if  they  are  attacked.  It  will  also  be  more 
satisfactory  in  hunting  cattle  and  other  animals  than 
are  all  the  arrows  that  you  use.  To  you  who  are  old 
men  I  leave  my  kettle  (pause);  I  carry  it  everywhere 
without  fear  of  breaking  it"  (being  of  copper  or  iron 
instead  of  clay).  "You  will  cook  in  it  meat  that 
your  young  men  bring  from  the  chase,  and  the  food 
which  you  offer  to  the  Frenchmen  who  come  to  visit 
you."1  And  so  he  went  on,  throwing  iron  awls  to  the 
women  to  be  used  instead  of  their  bone  bodkins,  iron 
knives  to  take  the  place  of  pieces  of  stone  in  killing 
beavers  and  cutting  their  meat,  till  he  reached  his  per- 
oration, which  was  punctuated  with  handfuls  of  round 
beads  for  the  adornment  of  their  children  and  girls. 

Do  not  think  this  a  petty  relation.  It  is  a  detail 
in  the  story  of  an  age  of  iron  succeeding,  in  a  single 
generation,  an  age  of  stone.  The  splendor  of  the  court 
and  age  of  Louis  XIV  was  beginning  to  brighten  the 
sombreness  of  the  northern  primeval  forests. 

It  is  this  ambassador  Perrot,  learned  in  the  craft  of 
the  woods  rather  than  in  that  of  the  courts,  more 
effective  in  his  forest  diplomacy  than  an  army  with 
banners,  who  soon  after  (1671)  appears  again  on  those 
shores,  summoning  the  nations  to  a  convocation  by 
the  side  of  that  northern  tumultuous  strait,  known 
everywhere  now  as  the  "Soo,"  then  as  the  Sault  Ste. 

'Blair,  "Indian  Tribes  of  the  Upper  Mississippi  Valley,"  I  :  330,  331. 


48  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Marie,  there  to  meet  the  representatives  of  the  king 
who  lived  across  the  water  and  of  the  Onontio  who 
governed  on  the  St.  Lawrence. 

This  convocation,  of  which  Perrot  was  the  success- 
ful herald,  was  held  in  the  beginning  of  summer  in 
the  year  1671  (the  good  fishing  doubtless  assisting  the 
persuasiveness  of  Perrot's  eloquence  in  procuring  the 
great  savage  audience).  When  the  fleets  of  canoes 
arrived  from  the  west  and  the  south  and  east,  Dau- 
mont  de  St.  Lusson  and  his  French  companions,  sent 
out  the  previous  autumn  from  Quebec,  having  wintered 
in  the  Mantoulin  Island,  were  there  to  meet  them. 
It  is  a  picture  for  the  Iliad.  Coureur  de  bois  and  priest 
had  penetrated  these  regions,  as  we  have  seen;  but  now 
was  to  take  place  the  formal  possession  by  the  crown 
of  a  territory  that  was  coming  to  be  recognized  as 
valuable  in  itself,  even  if  no  stream  ran  though  it  to 
the  coasts  that  looked  on  Asia. 

The  scene  is  kept  for  us  with  much  detail  and  color. 
On  a  beautiful  June  morning  the  procession  was 
formed,  the  rapids  probably  furnishing  the  only  music 
for  the  stately  march  of  soldier  and  priest.  After  St. 
Lusson,  four  Jesuits  led  the  processional:  Dablon, 
Allouez,  whom  we  have  already  seen  on  the  shores  of 
Superior,  Andre  from  the  Mantoulin  Island,  and 
Druilletes;  the  last,  familiar  from  his  long  visit  at 
Plymouth  and  Boston  with  the  character  of  the  Puri- 
tan colonies  and  doubtless  understanding  as  no  one 
else  in  that  company,  the  menace  to  the  French  of 
English  sturdiness  and  industry  and  self-reliant  free- 
dom. He  must  have  wondered  in  the  midst  of  all  that 
formal  vaunt  of  possession,  how  long  the  mountains 
would  hold  back  those  who  were  building  permanent 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    49 

bridges  over  streams,  instead  of  traversing  them  in 
ephemeral  interest,  or  as  paths  to  waters  beyond;  who 
were  working  the  iron  of  the  bogs  near  by,  instead  of 
hunting  for  the  more  precious  ores  or  metals  on  remote 
shores;  who  were  sawing  the  trees  into  lumber  for 
permanent  homes  and  shops,  instead  of  adapting  them- 
selves to  the  more  primitive  life  and  barter  in  the  woods; 
who  were  getting  riches  from  the  cleared  fields,  instead 
of  from  the  backs  of  beavers  in  the  sunless  forests;  who 
were  raising  sheep  and  multiplying  cattle,  instead  of 
hunting  deer  and  buffaloes;  who  were  beginning  to  trade 
with  European  ports  not  as  mere  voyageurs  but  as 
thrifty  merchants;  who  were  vitally  concerned  about 
their  own  salvation  first,  and  then  interested  in  the 
fate  of  the  savage;  and  who,  above  all,  were  learning 
in  town  meetings  to  govern  themselves,  instead  of 
having  all  their  daily  living  regulated  from  Versailles 
or  the  Louvre.  Druilletes,  remembering  New  England 
that  day,  must  have  wondered  as  to  the  future  of  this 
unpeopled,  uncultivated  empire  of  New  France,  with- 
out ploughs,  without  tame  animals,  without  people, 
even,  which  St.  Lusson  was  proclaiming.1  Was  its 
name  indeed  to  be  written  only  in  the  water  which 
their  canoes  traversed  ? 

There  were  fifteen  Frenchmen  with  St.  Lusson, 
among  them  the  quiet,  practical,  unboastful  Joliet, 
trained  for  the  priesthood,  but  turned  trader  and  ex- 
plorer, who  had  already  been  two  years  previous  out 
on  the  shores  of  Superior  looking  for  copper.  Mar- 
quette was  not  with  the  priests  but  was  urging  on  the 
reluctant  Hurons  and  Ottawas  who  did  not  arrive 
until  after  the  ceremony. 

1  See  Justin  Winsor  "Pageant  of  St.  Lusson,"  1892. 


50    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  French  were  grouped  about  a  cross  on  the  top 
of  a  knoll  near  the  rapids,  and  the  great  throng  of 
savages,  "many-tinted"  and  adorned  in  the  mode  of 
the  forest,  sat  or  stood  in  wider  circle.  Father  Dablon 
sanctified  a  great  wooden  cross.  It  was  raised  to  its 
place  while  the  inner  circle  sang  Vexilla  Regis.  Close 
to  the  cross  a  post  bearing  a  plate  inscribed  with  the 
royal  arms,  sent  out  by  Colbert,  was  erected,  and  the 
woods  heard  the  Exaudiat  chanted  while  a  priest  said 
a  prayer  for  the  king.  Then  St.  Lusson  (a  sword  in 
one  hand  and  "crumbling  turf  in  the  other")  cried  to 
his  French  followers  who  applauded  his  sentences,  to 
the  savages  who  could  not  understand,  to  the  rapids 
which  would  not  heed,  and  to  the  forests  which  have 
long  forgotten  the  vibrations  of  his  voice,  the  words  in 
French  to  which  these  words  in  English  correspond: 

"'In  the  name  of  the  most  high,  most  mighty  and 
most  redoubtable  monarch  Louis,  the  XlVth  of  the 
name,  most  Christian  King  of  France  and  Navarre, 
we  take  possession  of  the  said  place  of  Ste  Mary  of  the 
Falls  as  well  as  of  Lakes  Huron  and  Superieur,  the 
Island  of  Caientoton  and  of  all  other  Countries,  rivers, 
lakes  and  tributaries,  contiguous  and  adjacent  there- 
unto, as  well  discovered  as  to  be  discovered,  which  are 
bounded  on  the  one  side  by  the  Northern  and  Western 
Seas  and  on  the  other  side  by  the  South  Sea,  including 
all  its  length  or  breadth;'  Raising  at  each  of  the  said 
three  times  a  sod  of  earth  whilst  crying  Vive  le  Roy, 
and  making  the  whole  of  the  assembly  as  well  French 
as  Indians  repeat  the  same;  declaring  to  the  aforesaid 
Nations  that  henceforward  as  from  this  moment  they 
were  dependent  on  his  Majesty,  subject  to  be  con- 
trolled by  his  laws  and  to  follow  his  customs,  promis- 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    51 

ing  them  all  protection  and  succor  on  his  part  against 
the  incursion  or  invasion  of  their  enemies,  declaring 
unto  all  other  Potentates,  Princes  and  Sovereigns, 
States  and  Republics,  to  them  and  their  subjects,  that 
they  cannot  or  ought  not  seize  on,  or  settle  in,  any 
places  in  said  Country,  except  with  the  good  pleasure 
of  his  said  most  Christian  Majesty  and  of  him  who  will 
govern  the  Country  in  his  behalf,  on  pain  of  incurring 
his  hatred  and  the  effects  of  his  arms;  and  in  order 
that  no  one  plead  cause  of  ignorance,  we  have  attached 
to  the  back  the  Arms  of  France  thus  much  of  the 
present  our  Minute  of  the  taking  possession."1 

Then  the  priest  Allouez  (as  reported  by  his  brother 
priest  Dablon),  after  speaking  of  the  significance  of 
the  cross  they  had  just  raised,  told  them  of  the  great 
temporal  king  of  France,  of  him  whom  men  came  from 
every  quarter  of  the  earth  to  admire,  and  by  whom  all 
that  was  done  to  the  world  was  decided. 

"But  look  likewise  at  that  other  post,  to  which  are 
affixed  the  armorial  bearings  of  the  great  Captain  of 
France  whom  we  call  King.  He  lives  beyond  the  sea; 
he  is  the  Captain  of  the  greatest  Captains,  and  has 
not  his  equal  in  the  world.  All  the  Captains  you  have 
ever  seen,  or  of  whom  you  have  ever  heard,  are  mere 
children  compared  with  him.  He  is  like  a  great  tree, 
and  they,  only  like  little  plants  that  we  tread  under 
foot  in  walking.  You  know  about  Onnontio,  that 
famous  Captain  of  Quebec.  You  know  and  feel  that 
he  is  the  terror  of  the  Iroquois,  and  that  his  very 
name  makes  them  tremble,  now  that  he  has  laid  waste 
their  country  and  set  fire  to  their  Villages.  Beyond 
the  sea  there  are  ten  thousand  Onnontios  like  him, 

1  "Wisconsin  Historical  Collections,"  n  :  28. 


52    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

who  are  only  the  Soldiers  of  that  great  Captain,  our 
Great  King,  of  whom  I  am  speaking.  When  he  says, 
'I  am  going  to  war,'  all  obey  him;  and  those  ten  thou- 
sand Captains  raise  Companies  of  a  hundred  soldiers 
each,  both  on  sea  and  on  land.  Some  embark  in  ships, 
one  or  two  hundred  in  number,  like  those  that  you  have 
seen  at  Quebec.  Your  Canoes  hold  only  four  or  five 
men — or,  at  the  very  most,  ten  or  twelve.  Our  ships 
in  France  hold  four  or  five  hundred,  and  even  as  many 
as  a  thousand.  Other  men  make  war  by  land,  but  in 
such  vast  numbers  that,  if  drawn  up  in  a  double  file, 
they  would  extend  farther  than  from  here  to  Missis- 
saquenk,  although  the  distance  exceeds  twenty  leagues. 
When  he  attacks,  he  is  more  terrible  than  the  thunder: 
the  earth  trembles,  the  air  and  the  sea  are  set  on  fire 
by  the  discharge  of  his  Cannon;  while  he  has  been 
seen  amid  his  squadrons,  all  covered  with  the  blood 
of  his  foes,  of  whom  he  has  slain  so  many  with  his 
sword  that  he  does  not  count  their  scalps,  but  the 
rivers  of  blood  which  he  sets  flowing.  So  many  pris- 
oners of  war  does  he  lead  away  that  he  makes  no 
account  of  them,  letting  them  go  about  whither  they 
will,  to  show  that  he  does  not  fear  them.  No  one  now 
dares  make  war  upon  him,  all  nations  beyond  the 
sea  having  most  submissively  sued  for  peace.  From  all 
parts  of  the  world  people  go  to  listen  to  his  words  and 
to  admire  him,  and  he  alone  decides  all  the  affairs  of 
the  world.  What  shall  I  say  of  his  wealth  ?  You 
count  yourselves  rich  when  you  have  ten  or  twelve 
sacks  of  corn,  some  hatchets,  glass  beads,  kettles,  or 
other  things  of  that  sort.  He  has  towns  of  his  own, 
more  in  number  than  you  have  people  in  all  these 
countries  five  hundred  leagues  around;  while  in  each 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF         53 

town  there  are  warehouses  containing  enough  hatchets 
to  cut  down  all  your  forests,  kettles  to  cook  all  your 
moose,  and  glass  beads  to  fill  all  your  cabins.  His 
house  is  longer  than  from  here  to  the  head  of  the 
Sault" — that  is,  more  than  half  a  league — "and  higher 
than  the  tallest  of  your  trees;  and  it  contains  more 
families  than  the  largest  of  your  Villages  can  hold."1 

This  remarkable  proclamation  and  this  extraordi- 
nary speech  are  to  be  found  in  the  records.  And  the 
historian  would  end  the  incident  here.  But  one  may  at 
least  wonder  what  impressions  of  Louis  the  Great  and 
Paris  and  France  these  savages  carried  back  to  their 
lodges  to  ponder  over  and  talk  about  in  the  winter 
nights;  and  one  must  wonder,  too,  what  impression 
the  proclamation  and  pantomime  of  possession  made 
upon  their  primitive  minds.  Perrot  translated  the 
proclamation  for  them,  and  asked  them  to  repeat 
"Long  live  the  king!"  but  it  must  have  been  a  free 
translation  that  he  made  into  their  idioms;  he  must 
have  softened  "vassals"  to  "children,"  and  "king"  to 
"father,"  and  made  them  understand  that  the  laws 
and  customs  of  Versailles  would  not  curb  their  freedom 
of  coiffure  or  attire,  of  chase  or  of  leisure,  on  the  shores 
of  Superior. 

The  speech  of  Allouez  may  seem  full  of  hyperbole 
to  those  who  know,  in  history,  the  king,  and,  by  sight, 
the  palace  employed  in  the  priest's  similes;  but  if  we 
think  of  Louis  XIV  not  in  his  person  but  as  a  repre- 
sentative of  the  civilization  of  Europe  that  was  as- 
serting its  first  claim  there  in  the  wilderness,  and  give 
to  the  word  of  the  priest  something  of  the  import  of 
prophecy,  the  address  becomes  mild,  indeed.    Through 

'"Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  55  :  m-113. 


54  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

those  very  rapids  a  single  fleet  of  boats  carries  every 
year  enough  iron  ore  to  supply  every  man,  woman,  and 
child  in  the  United  States  (97,000,000)  with  a  new  iron 
kettle  every  year;  another  fleet  bears  enough  to  meet 
the  continent's,  if  not  the  world's,  need  of  hatchets. 
Trains  laden  with  golden  grain,  more  precious  than 
beads,  trains  that  would  encircle  the  palace  at  Ver- 
sailles or  the  Louvre  now  cross  that  narrow  strait 
every  day.  A  track  of  iron,  bearing  the  abbreviated 
name  of  the  rapids  and  the  mission,  penetrates  the 
forests  and  swamps  from  which  that  savage  congrega- 
tion was  gathered  in  the  first  great  non-religious  con- 
vocation on  the  shores  of  the  western  lakes  where  men 
with  the  scholarship  of  the  Sorbonne  now  march  every 
year  with  emblems  of  learning  on  their  shoulders. 

As  to  the  proclamation,  Parkman  asks,  what  now 
remains  of  the  sovereignty  it  so  pompously  announced  ? 
"Now  and  then,"  he  answers,  "the  accents  of  France 
on  the  lips  of  some  straggling  boatman,  or  vagabond 
half-breed — this  and  nothing  more." 

But  again  I  would  ask  you  to  think  of  St.  Lusson  not 
as  proclaiming  merely  the  sovereignty  of  Louis  XIV 
or  of  France,  but  as  heralding  the  new  civilization,  for 
if  we  are  to  appreciate  the  real  significance  of  that 
pageant  and  of  France's  mission,  we  must  associate 
with  that  day's  ceremony,  not  merely  the  subsequent 
wanderings  of  a  few  men  of  French  birth  or  ancestry 
in  all  those  "countries,  rivers,  lakes  and  streams," 
"bounded  on  the  one  side  by  the  seas  of  the  north 
and  west  and  on  the  other  by  the  South  Sea,"  but  all 
that  life  to  which  they  led  the  adventurous,  perilous 
way. 

The  Iroquois  and  disease  had  thinned  the  Indian 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    55 

populations  of  the  northeast,  but  here  was  a  new  and 
a  friendly  menace  to  that  stone-age  barbarism  whose 
dusky  subjects  found  their  way  back  to  their  haunts 
by  the  stars,  lighted  their  fires  by  their  flint,  and  glut- 
tonously feasted  in  plenty,  or  stoically  fasted  in  famine. 

For  the  French  it  was  a  challenge  to  "those  coun- 
tries, lakes  and  islands  bounded  by  the  seas."  They 
must  now  "make  good  the  grandeur  of  their  hopes." 
And  a  brave  beginning  is  soon  to  be  made.  This 
highly  colored  scene  becomes  frontispiece  of  another 
glorious  chapter,  in  the  midst  of  whose  hardship  one 
will  turn  many  a  time  to  look  with  a  sneer  or  smile, 
or  with  pity,  at  the  figures  in  court  garments,  burnished 
armor,  and  "cleansed  vestments,"  standing  where  the 
east  and  the  west  and  the  far  north  and  the  south 
meet. 

From  the  shores  of  a  seigniory  on  the  St.  Lawrence, 
eight  or  nine  miles  from  Montreal,  just  above  those 
hoarse-voiced,  mocking  rapids  which  had  lured  and 
disappointed  Cartier  and  Champlain  and  Maison- 
neuve,  and  which  were  to  get  their  lasting  name  of 
derision  from  the  disappointment  of  the  man  who 
now  (1668)  stands  there,  Robert  Rene  Cavelier,  Sieur 
de  la  Salle,  looks  across  the  waters  of  Lake  St.  Louis 
(into  which  the  St.  Lawrence  for  a  little  way  widens) 
to  the  "dim  forests  of  Chateauguay  and  Beauharnois." 
His  thoughts  look  still  farther,  for  they  are  out  in  that 
valley  of  his  imagination  through  which  a  river  "must 
needs  flow,"  as  he  thinks,  "into  the  'Vermilion  Sea'  ' 
— the  Gulf  of  California.    The  old  possessing  dream  ! 

This  young  man  (but  twenty-five  years  of  age)  was 
a  scion  of  an  old  and  rich  family  of  Rouen.  As  a  youth 
he  showed  unusual  traits  of  intellect  and  character  and 


56  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

(it  is  generally  agreed)  doubtless  because  of  his  prom- 
ise, he  was  led  to  the  benches  of  the  Jesuits.  Whether 
this  be  true  or  not,  he  was  an  earnest  Catholic.  But 
his  temperament  would  not  let  him  yield  unquestioned 
submission  to  any  will  save  his  own.  For  it  was  will 
and  not  mere  passion  that  mastered  his  course.  "In 
his  faults,"  says  a  sympathetic  historian,  "the  love  of 
pleasure  had  no  part."  At  twenty-three  he  had  left 
Rouen,  and  securing  a  seigniory,  where  we  have  just 
seen  him,  in  the  "most  dangerous  place  in  Canada," 
he  made  clearing  for  the  settlement  which  he  named 
the  Seigniory  of  St.  Sulpice  (having  received  it  from  the 
seminary  of  St.  Sulpice),  but  which  his  enemies  named, 
as  they  named  the  rapids,  "La  Chine." 

There  tutored  in  the  Indian  languages  and  inflamed 
of  imagination  as  he  looked  day  after  day  off  to  the 
west,  his  thoughts  "made  alliance  with  the  sun,"  as 
Lescarbot  would  have  said,  and  dwelt  on  exploration 
and  empire. 

It  was  ten  years  later  that  those  who  were  keeping 
the  mission  and  the  trading-post  on  Point  St.  Ignace, 
where  to-day  candles  burn  before  the  portrait  of  Pere 
Marquette,  saw  a  vessel  equipped  with  sails,  as  large 
as  the  ships  with  which  Jacques  Cartier  first  crossed  the 
Atlantic,  come  ploughing  its  way  through  waters  that 
had  never  before  borne  such  burdens  without  the 
beating  of  oars  or  paddles.  Its  commander  is  Sieur 
de  la  Salle,  now  a  noble  and  possessed  of  a  seigniory 
two  hundred  miles  west  of  that  on  which  we  left  him 
— two  hundred  miles  nearer  his  goal.  This  galleon, 
called  the  Griffin  because  it  carried  on  its  prow  the 
carving  of  a  griffin,  "in  honor  of  the  armorial  bearings 
of  Count    Frontenac,"   was   the   precursor   of  those 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    57 

mighty  fleets  that  now  stir  those  waters  with  their 
commerce. 

These  ten  years  of  disaster  and  disappointment,  but 
also  of  inflexible  purpose  and  indomitable  persistence, 
must  not  be  left  to  lie  unremembered,  though  the  re- 
cital must  be  the  briefest.  In  1669,  in  company  with 
some  Sulpitian  priests  and  others,  twenty-four  in  all, 
he  sets  forth  from  his  seigniory.  Along  the  south  shore 
of  Ontario  they  coast,  stopping  on  the  way  to  visit  the 
Senecas,  La  Salle,  at  least,  hoping  to  find  there  a  guide 
to  the  headwaters  of  what  is  now  known  as  the  Ohio 
River.  Disappointed,  he  with  them  journeyed  on 
westward  past  the  mouth  of  the  Niagara  River,  hear- 
ing but  the  sound  of  the  mighty  cataract.  At  the  head 
of  Lake  Ontario  they  have  the  astounding  fortune 
to  meet  Louis  Joliet,  who  with  a  companion  was  re- 
turning from  Superior  (two  years  before  the  pageant 
of  St.  Lusson)  and  who  had  just  discovered  that  great 
inland  lake  between  the  two  lakes,  Ontario  and  Huron 
(which  had  been  shown  on  French  maps  as  connected 
by  a  river  only).  This  lake,  Erie,  now  the  busiest 
perhaps  of  all  that  great  chain,  had  been  avoided  be- 
cause of  the  hostility  of  the  Iroquois,  and  so  it  was 
that  it  was  last  to  rise  out  of  the  geographic  darkness 
of  that  region.  Even  Joliet's  Iroquois  guide,  although 
well  acquainted  with  the  easier  route,  had  not  dared 
to  go  to  the  Niagara  outlet  but  had  followed  the 
Grand  River  from  its  northern  shores  and  then  por- 
taged to  Lake  Ontario. 

The  Sulpitian  priests  and  their  companions  followed 
to  the  west  the  newly  found  course,  but  La  Salle,  the 
goal  of  whose  thought  was  still  the  Ohio,  feigning  ill- 
ness (as  it  is  believed),  received  the  sacrament  from 


58  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  priests  (an  altar  being  improvised  of  some  paddles), 
parted  from  them,  and,  as  they  at  the  time  supposed, 
went  back  to  Montreal.  But  it  was  not  of  such  fibre 
that  his  purposes  were  knit.  Just  where  he  went  it  is 
not  with  certainty  known,  but  it  is  generally  conceded 
that  he  reached  and  followed  the  Ohio  as  far  at  least  as 
the  site  of  Louisville,  Ky.  It  is  claimed  by  some  that 
he  coasted  the  unknown  western  shores  of  Lake  Huron; 
that  he  reached  the  site  of  Chicago;  and  that  he  even 
saw  the  Mississippi  two  years  at  least  before  Marquette 
and  Joliet.  What  Parkman  says  in  his  later  edition, 
after  full  and  critical  acquaintance  with  the  Margry 
papers  in  Paris,  is  this:  "La  Salle  discovered  the  Ohio, 
and  in  all  probability  the  Illinois  also;  but  that  he  dis- 
covered the  Mississippi  has  not  been  proved,  nor,  in 
the  light  of  the  evidence  we  have,  is  it  likely."  Winsor 
argues  that  in  the  minds  of  those  who  knew  him  in 
Montreal,  La  Salle's  projects  had  failed,  since  it  was 
then  that  the  mocking  name  was  given  to  his  estate — 
a  name  which,  by  the  way,  has  been  made  good,  as 
some  one  remarks,  "by  the  passage  across  La  Salle's 
old  possessions  of  the  Canadian  Pacific  Railway,"  a 
new  way  to  China. 

I  think  we  must  admit,  with  his  enemies  of  that  day 
and  hostile  authorities  of  this,  despite  Margry's  docu- 
ments, that  except  for  his  increased  knowledge  of  the 
approaches  and  his  acquaintance  with  Indians  and 
the  conditions  of  nature  in  that  valley,  La  Salle's  ex- 
pedition was  a  failure.  It  was  his  first  defiance  of  the 
wilderness  before  him  and  the  first  victory  of  his  enemies 
behind  him. 

While  Marquette  is  spending  the  winter,  sick  of  a 
mortal  illness,  in  the  hut  on  the  Chicago  portage,  La 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    59 

Salle  is  in  Paris,  bearing  a  letter  from  Frontenac,  in 
which  he  is  recommended  to  Minister  Colbert  as  "the 
most  capable  man  I  know  to  carry  on  every  kind  of 
enterprise  and  discovery"  and  as  having  "the  most 
perfect  knowledge  of  the  state  of  the  country,"1  that 
is,  of  the  west.  A  letter  I  find  was  sent  to  Colbert 
under  the  same  or  proximate  date2  acquainting  Col- 
bert with  the  discovery  made  by  Joliet.  La  Salle  must 
therefore  have  known  of  the  Mississippi  and  its  course, 
even  if  he  himself  had  not  beheld  it  with  his  own  eyes 
or  felt  the  impulse  of  its  current. 

He  goes  back  to  Canada  possessed  of  a  new  and 
valuable  seigniory  (having  spent  the  proceeds  of  the 
first  in  his  unsuccessful  venture)  under  charge  to  gar- 
rison Fort  Frontenac  (on  the  north  shore  of  Ontario) 
and  to  gather  about  it  a  French  colony.  For  two  years 
he  labors  there,  bringing  a  hundred  acres  of  sunlight 
into  the  forests,  building  ships  for  the  navigation  of 
the  lake,  and  establishing  a  school  under  the  direction 
of  the  friars.  He  might  have  stayed  there  and  become 
rich  "if  he  had  preferred  gain  to  glory" — there  where 
he  had  both  solitude  and  power.  "Feudal  lord  of 
the  forest  around  him,  commander  of  a  garrison  raised 
and  paid  by  himself,  founder  of  the  mission  and  patron 
of  the  church,  he  reigned  the  autocrat  of  his  lonely 
little  empire."  But  this  does  not  satisfy  him.  It  is 
but  a  step  toward  the  greater  empire  still  farther  to 
the  west. 

In  1677  he  comes  back  again  to  Paris  with  a  desire 
not  for  land,  but  for  authority  to  explore  and  open  up 
the  western  country,  which  he  describes  in  a  letter  to 

1Margry,  "  Decouvertes  et  etablissements  des  Fran^ais,"  I  :  227. 
2Winsor  dates  letter  November  14,  1674.    Margry,  November  II. 


60  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Colbert.  It  is  nearly  all  "so  beautiful  and  fertile;  so 
free  from  forests  and  so  full  of  meadows,  brooks  and 
rivers;  so  abounding  in  fish,  game,  and  venison  that 
one  can  find  there  in  plenty,  and  with  little  trouble, 
all  that  is  needful  for  the  support  of  powerful  colonies. 
The  soil  will  produce  anything  that  is  raised  in  France."1 
He  says  that  cattle  may  be  left  out  all  winter,  calls  at- 
tention to  some  hides  he  has  brought  with  him  of  cattle 
whose  wool  is  also  valuable,  and  again  expresses  con- 
fidence that  colonies  would  become  prosperous,  es- 
pecially as  they  would  be  increased  by  the  tractable 
Indians,  who  will  readily  adapt  themselves  to  the 
French  way  of  life,  as  soon  as  they  taste  the  advantages 
of  French  friendship.  He  does  not  fail  to  mention 
the  hostility  of  the  Iroquois  and  the  threatened  rivalry 
of  the  English,  who  are  beginning  to  covet  that  country 
— all  of  which  only  animates  him  the  more  to  action. 
Lodged  in  Paris  in  an  obscure  street,  Rue  de  la  Truan- 
derie,  and  attacked  as  a  visionary  or  worse,  he  is  yet 
petitioning  Louis  XIV  for  the  government  of  a  realm 
larger  than  the  king's  own,  and  holding  conference  with 
Colbert. 

In  the  early  summer,  after  his  winter  of  waiting 
somewhere  in  the  vicinity  in  which  I  have  written  this 
chapter,  a  patent  comes  to  him  from  the  summer  palace 
at  St.-Germain-en-Laye,  which  must  have  been  to  him 
far  more  than  his  patent  of  nobility  or  title  to  any  es- 
tate in  France: 

"Louis,  by  the  grace  of  God  King  of  France  and 
Navarre,  to  our  dear  and  well-beloved  Robert  Cavelier, 
Sieur  de  la  Salle,  greeting.  We  have  received  with 
favor  the  very  humble  petition  made  us  in  your  name 

^arkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  122.     Margry,  1  :  331. 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF         61 

to  permit  you  to  undertake  the  discovery  of  the  western 
parts  of  New  France;  and  we  have  the  more  willingly 
consented  to  this  proposal,  since  we  have  nothing  more 
at  heart  than  the  exploration  of  this  country,  through 
which,  to  all  appearances,  a  way  may  be  found  to 
Mexico."1  La  Salle,  accordingly,  was  permitted  to 
build  forts  at  his  own  expense,  to  carry  on  certain 
trade  in  buffalo-hides,  and  explore  to  his  heart's  con- 
tent. 

This  lodger  in  Rue  de  la  Truanderie  now  sets  about 
raising  funds  for  his  enterprise  and,  having  succeeded 
chiefly  among  his  brothers  and  relations,  he  gathers 
materials  for  two  vessels,  hires  shipwrights,  and  starts 
from  Rochelle  for  his  empire,  his  commission  doubtless 
bound  to  his  body,  taking  with  him  as  his  lieutenant 
Henri  de  Tonty — son  of  the  inventor  of  the  Tontine 
form  of  life  insurance  who  had  come  to  France  from 
Naples — a  most  valuable  and  faithful  associate  and 
possessed  of  an  intrepid  soul  to  match  his  own. 

From  Fort  Frontenac,  an  outpost,  La  Salle's  com- 
pany pushes  out  to  build  a  fort  below  Niagara  Falls 
near  the  mouth  of  the  Niagara  River,  the  key  to  the 
four  great  lakes  above,  and  to  construct  a  vessel  of 
fifty  tons  above  the  Falls  for  the  navigation  of  these 
upper  lakes.  It  is  on  this  journey  that  the  world  makes 
first  acquaintance  of  that  mendacious  historian  Friar 
Hennepin,  who,  equipped  with  a  portable  altar,  min- 
istered to  his  companions  and  the  savages  along  the 
way  and  wrote  the  chronicles  of  the  expedition.  It  is  he 
who  has  left  us  the  first  picture  of  Niagara  Falls  un- 
profaned  by  tourists;  of  the  buffalo,  now  extinct  ex- 
cept for   a   few  scrawny  specimens  in   parks,  and  of 

1  Various  translations.     Original  in  Margry,  I  :  337. 


62  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

St.  Anthony  Falls.  After  loss  by  wreck  of  a  part  of 
the  material  intended  for  the  vessel  and  repeated  de- 
lays, due  to  La  Salle's  creditors  at  Frontenac  and  the 
Indians  on  his  way,  the  vessel  was  at  last  completed, 
launched  with  proper  ceremonies,  and  started  on  her 
maiden  trip  up  those  lakes  where  sail  was  never  seen 
before. 

It  is  this  ship  that  found  temporary  haven  in  the 
cove  back  of  Point  St.  Ignace  in  1679  while  La  Salle, 
"very  finely  dressed  in  his  scarlet  cloak  trimmed  with 
gold  lace,"  knelt,  his  companions  about  him,  and  again 
heard  mass  where  the  bones  of  Marquette  were  doubt- 
less even  then  gathered  before  the  Jesuit  altar.  Thence 
they  pushed  on  to  Green  Bay,  where  some  of  his  ad- 
vance agents  had  gathered  peltries  for  his  coming.  The 
Griffin,  loaded  with  these,  her  first  and  precious  cargo, 
was  sent  back  to  satisfy  his  creditors,  and  La  Salle 
with  fourteen  men  put  forth  in  their  canoes  for  the 
land  of  his  commission,  of  "bufFalo-hides,"  and  of 
"the  way  toward  Mexico." 

I  will  "make  the  Griffin  fly  above  the  crows,"  La 
Salle  is  recorded  to  have  said  more  than  once  in  his 
threat  toward  those  of  the  Black  Gowns  who  were 
opposing  his  imperious  plans,  because  they  aimed  at  the 
occupation,  fortification,  and  settlement  of  what  the 
order  still  hoped  to  keep  for  itself.  But  the  flight  of 
this  aquatic  griffin  gave  to  La  Salle  no  good  omen  of 
triumph.  The  vessel  never  reached  safe  port,  so  far 
as  is  known.  Tonty  searched  all  the  east  coast  of  Lake 
Michigan  for  sight  of  her  sail,  but  in  vain.  And  those 
whom  in  America  we  call  "researchers" — those  who 
hunt  through  manuscripts  in  libraries — have  not  as 
yet  had  word  of  her.     Many  have  doubtless  walked, 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    63 

as  I,  the  shores  of  that  lake  with  thoughts  of  her,  but 
no  one  has  found  so  much  as  a  feather  of  her  pinions. 
Whether  she  foundered  in  a  storm  or  was  treacherously 
sunk  and  her  cargo  stolen,  no  one  will  probably  ever 
know. 

La  Salle  and  his  men  in  their  heavily  laden  canoes 
had  a  tempestuous  voyage  up  the  west  shore  of  Lake 
Michigan.1  They  passed  the  site  of  Chicago,  deciding 
upon  another  course  (which  persuades  me  that  La 
Salle  must  have  been  in  that  region  before)  and  on 
till  they  reached  the  mouth  of  the  St.  Joseph  River, 
where  precious  time  was  lost  in  waiting  for  Tonty 
and  his  party  coming  up  the  other  shore.  I  take  space 
to  speak  in  such  detail  of  this  voyage  because  it  traces 
another  important  route  into  the  valley. 

About  seventy  miles  up  the  stream  there  stands  an 
old  cedar-tree  bearing,  as  it  is  believed  by  antiqua- 
rians, the  blaze  marks  of  the  old  French  broadaxes 
and  marking  the  beginning  of  another  of  those  historic 
portage  paths  over  the  valley's  low  rim.  I  have  visited 
this  portage  more  than  once,  and  when  last  there  I 
dug  away  the  sand  and  soil  about  the  trunk  of  the 
tree  till  I  could  trace  the  scar  left  by  the  axe  of  the 
French.  It  is  only  about  two  miles  from  this  tree  at 
the  bend  of  the  St.  Joseph  to  where  a  mere  ditch  in  the 
midst  of  the  prairie,  a  tributary  of  the  Illinois,  soon 
gathers  enough  eager  water  to  carry  a  canoe  toward  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico. 

1  It  will  illustrate  what  a  change  has  come  over  a  bit  of  that  shore  along 
which  he  passed  if  I  tell  you  that  when  I  landed  there  one  day  from  a  later 
lake  Griffin,  at  a  place  called  Milwaukee — in  La  Salle's  day  but  another 
"nameless  barbarism" — the  first  person  whom  I  encountered  chanced  to 
be  reading  a  copy  of  the  London  Spectator — the  ultimate  symbol  of  civili- 
zation some  would  think  it. 


64  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

I  have  read  in  the  chronicles,  with  a  regret  as  great 
as  that  of  the  hungry  Hennepin,  that  the  Illinois,  from 
whom  La  Salle  expected  hospitality  at  their  village 
farther  down  the  Illinois  River,  which  had  been  visited 
by  Marquette  twice,  were  off  on  their  hunting  expedi- 
tions. But  I  have  satisfaction  in  knowing  that  he 
took  needful  food  from  their  caches  in  my  own  county, 
now  named  La  Salle. 

Early  in  January  they  passed  on  to  a  village  four 
days  beyond — the  site  of  the  second  largest  city  in  the 
State  of  Illinois.  There  La  Salle,  detained  by  Indian 
suspicions  of  his  alliance  with  the  Iroquois,  discour- 
aged by  the  desertion  of  some  of  his  own  men  and  by 
the  certainty  that  the  Griffin  was  lost  beyond  all 
question  not  only  with  its  skins  but  with  the  materials 
for  a  vessel,  which  he  purposed  building  for  the  Missis- 
sippi waters,  stayed  for  the  rest  of  the  winter,  building 
for  shelter  and  protection  a  fort  which  he  named  Fort 
Crevecceur,  not  to  memorialize  his  own  dishearten- 
ments  as  some  hint,  but,  as  we  are  assured  by  other 
historians,  to  celebrate  the  demolition  of  Fort  Creve- 
cceur in  the  Netherlands  by  Louis  XIV,  in  which  Tonty 
had  participated.  The  vessel  for  the  Mississippi  he 
bravely  decides  to  build  despite  the  desertion  of  his 
sawyers,  who  had  fled  to  the  embrace  of  barbarism 
and  who,  fortunately,  did  not  return  to  prevent  the 
employment  of  the  unskilled  hands  of  La  Salle  him- 
self and  some  others  of  his  men.  And  so  the  first  set- 
tlement in  Illinois  begins. 

On  the  last  day  of  February  Father  Hennepin  and 
two  associates  were  sent  down  the  Illinois  River  on  a 
voyage  of  exploration,  carrying  abundant  gifts  with 
which  to  make  addresses  to  the  Indians  along  the  way. 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    65 

We  may  not  follow  their  tribulations  and  experiences, 
but  we  have  reason  to  believe  that  they  reached  the 
upper  waters  of  the  Mississippi.  There,  taken  by  the 
Sioux,  they  were  in  humiliating  and  even  perilous  cap- 
tivity till  rescued  by  the  aid  of  Du  Lhut.  We  almost 
wish  that  the  rumor  that  Hennepin  had  been  hung 
by  his  own  waist-cord  had  been  true,  if  only  we  could 
have  had  his  first  book  without  the  second. 

On  the  next  day  La  Salle,  leaving  Tonty  in  command, 
set  out  amid  the  drifting  ice  of  the  river  with  four  or 
perhaps  six1  men  and  a  guide  for  Fort  Frontenac,  to 
replace  at  once  the  articles  lost  in  the  Griffin,  else  an- 
other year  would  be  spent  in  vain.  Having  walked 
many,  many  miles  along  that  particular  river  on  those 
prairies,  I  can  appreciate,  as  perhaps  some  readers  can- 
not, what  it  means  to  enter  upon  a  journey  of  a  thou- 
sand miles  when  the  "ground  is  oozy"  and  patches  of 
snow  lie  about,  and  the  ice  is  not  strong  enough  to 
bear  one's  weight  but  thick  enough  to  hinder  one's 
progress.  La  Salle,  moreover,  was  in  constant  danger 
of  Indians  of  various  tribes.  In  a  letter  to  a  friend  he 
said  that  though  he  knew  that  they  must  suffer  all 
the  time  from  hunger,  sleep  on  the  open  ground,  and 
often  without  food,  watch  by  night  and  march  by 
day,  loaded  with  baggage,  sometimes  pushing  through 
thickets,  sometimes  wading  whole  days  through  marshes 
where  the  water  was  waist-deep;  still  he  was  resolved 
to  go.  Two  of  the  men  fell  ill.  A  canoe  was  made  for 
them  and  the  journey  continued.  Two  men  were  sent 
to  Point  St.  Ignace  to  learn  if  any  news  had  come  of 
the  Griffin.  At  Niagara,  where  he  learned  of  further 
misfortune,  he  left  the  other  two  Frenchmen  and  the 

1  Margry,  I  :  488. 


66    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

faithful  Mohigan  Indian  as  unfit  for  further  travel  and 
pushed  on  with  three  fresh  men  to  Fort  Frontenac, 
which  he  reached  in  sixty-five  days  from  the  day  of 
his  starting  from  Fort  Crevecceur.  This  gives  intima- 
tion and  illustration  of  the  will  which  possessed  the 
body  of  this  "man  of  thought,  trained  amid  arts  and 
letters."  "In  him,"  said  the  Puritan  Parkman,  "an 
unconquerable  mind  held  at  its  service  a  frame  of 
iron."  And  Fiske  adds:  "We  may  see  here  how  the 
sustaining  power  of  wide-ranging  thoughts  and  a  lofty 
purpose  enabled  the  scholar,  reared  in  luxury,  to  sur- 
pass in  endurance  the  Indian  guide  and  the  hunter  in- 
ured to  the  hardships  of  the  forest."  I  have  wondered 
how  his  petition  to  the  king,  if  written  after  this  jour- 
ney, would  have  described  this  valley.  But  its  at- 
traction seems  not  to  be  less  despite  this  experience, 
for  he  was  setting  forth  again,  when  word  came  to 
him  that  his  Fort  Crevecceur  had  been  destroyed, 
most  of  his  men  deserting  and  throwing  into  the  river 
the  stores  and  goods  they  could  not  carry  away ! 

All  has  to  be  begun  again.  Less  than  nothing  is 
left  to  him  of  all  his  capital.  Nothing  is  left  except 
his  own  inflexible  spirit  and  the  loyalty  of  his  Tonty 
in  the  heart  of  the  wilderness.  Still  undismayed,  he 
turns  his  hand  to  the  giant  task  again,  only  to  find 
when  he  reaches  the  Illinois  a  dread  foreboding  of  the 
crowning  disaster.  The  Iroquois,  the  scourge  of  the 
east,  had  swept  down  the  valley  of  the  Illinois  like 
hyenas  of  the  prairies,  leaving  total  desolation  in  their 
path.  After  a  vain,  anxious  search  for  Tonty  among  the 
ruins  and  the  dead,  he  makes  his  way  back,  finding  at 
last  at  the  junction  of  the  two  rivers  that  make  the 
Illinois  a  bit  of  wood  cut  by  a  saw. 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    67 

I  fear  to  tire  the  reader  with  the  monotony  of  the 
mere  rehearsal  of  difficulty  and  discouragement  and 
despairful  circumstance  which  I  feel  it  needful  to  pre- 
sent in  order  to  give  faithful  background  to  the  story 
of  the  valley.  I  have  by  no  means  told  all:  of  continued 
malevolence  where  there  should  have  been  help;  of  the 
conspiracy  of  every  possible  untoward  circumstance 
to  block  his  way.  But  the  telling  of  so  much  will  be 
tolerated  in  the  knowledge  that,  after  all,  his  master 
spirit  did  triumph  over  every  ill  and  obstacle.  With 
Tonty,  who,  as  he  writes,  is  full  of  zeal,  he  confounded 
his  enemies  at  home,  gathered  the  tribes  of  the  west 
into  a  confederacy  against  the  Iroquois,  as  Champlain 
had  done  in  the  east,  gave  up  for  the  present  the 
building  of  the  vessel,  and  in  168 1,  the  river  being 
frozen,  set  out  on  sledges  at  Chicago  portage  and  made 
a  prosperous  journey  down  the  Illinois  to  Fort  Creve- 
cceur.  Re-embarking  in  his  canoes,  they  paddled  noise- 
lessly past  tenantless  villages  into  the  Mississippi. 
He  went  beyond  the  mouth  of  the  Arkansas,  reached 
by  Joliet  and  Marquette;  he  was  entertained  by  the 
Indians  of  whom  Chateaubriand  has  written  with 
such  charm  in  his  "Atala";  and  at  last,  in  April,  1682, 
fifteen  years  from  the  days  that  he  looked  longingly 
from  his  seigniory  above  the  Lachine  Rapids,  he  found 
the  "brackish  water  changed  to  brine,"  the  salt  breath 
of  the  sea  touched  his  face,  and  the  "broad  bosom  of 
the  great  gulf  opened  on  his  sight — limitless,  voice- 
less, lonely  as  when  born  of  chaos,  without  a  sail,  with- 
out a  sign  of  life." 

His  French  companions  and  his  great  company  of 
Indians  about  him,  he  repeated  there,  in  the  subtropi- 
cal spring,  the  ceremony  which  ten  years  before  had 


68  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

been  performed  two  thousand  miles  and  more  by  the 
water  to  the  north,  but  in  phrases  which  his  inflexible 
purpose,  valorously  pursued,  had  given  him  a  greater 
right  to  pronounce.  "In  the  name  of  the  most  high, 
mighty,  invincible  and  victorious  prince,  Louis  the 
Great — I, — in  virtue  of  the  commission  of  his  majesty 
which  I  hold  in  my  hand,  and  which  may  be  seen  by 
all  whom  it  may  concern,  have  taken  and  do  now  take, 
in  the  name  of  his  Majesty — possession  of  this  country 
of  Louisiana,  the  seas,  harbors,  ports,  bays,  adjacent 
straits,  and  all  nations,  peoples,  provinces,  cities,  towns, 
villages,  mines,  minerals,  fisheries,  streams,  and  rivers, 
— from  the  mouth  of  the  great  river  St.  Louis,  other- 
wise called  the  Ohio, — as  also  along  the  river  Colbert, 
or  Mississippi,  and  the  rivers  which  discharge  them- 
selves thereinto,  from  its  source  beyond  the  Nadoues- 
sioux — as  far  as  its  mouth  at  the  sea,  or  Gulf  of  Mexico, 
and  also  to  the  mouth  of  the  River  of  Palms,  upon  the 
assurance  we  have  had  from  the  natives  of  these 
countries,  that  we  are  the  first  Europeans  who  have 
descended  or  ascended  the  river  Colbert."1 

None  could  have  remembered  the  emaciated  fol- 
lowers of  De  Soto,  who  cared  not  for  the  land  since  they 
had  found  no  gold  there  and  asked  only  to  be  carried 
back  to  the  sea,  whence  they  had  so  foolishly  wan- 
dered. There  were  probably  not  even  traditions  of 
the  white  god  who  had  a  century  and  a  half  before 
been  buried  in  the  river  that  his  mortality  might  be 
concealed.  It  was,  indeed,  a  French  river,  from  where 
Hennepin  had  been  captured  by  the  Sioux  through 
the  stretches  covered  by  Marquette  and  Joliet  to  the 
very  sea  which  La  Salle  had  at  last  touched.     The 

1  Margry,  2  :  191. 


THE  GREAT  LAKES  TO  THE  GULF    69 

water  path  from  Belle  Isle,  Labrador,  to  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico  was  open,  with  only  short  portages  at  La- 
chine  and  Niagara  and  of  a  few  paces  where  the  Fox 
all  but  touches  the  Wisconsin,  the  Chicago  the  Des 
Plaines,  or  the  St.  Joseph  the  Kankakee.  It  took  al- 
most a  century  and  a  half  to  open  that  way,  but  every 
league  of  it  was  pioneered  by  the  French,  and  if  not  for 
the  French  forever,  is  the  credit  the  less  theirs? 

When  the  "weathered  voyagers"  that  day  on  the 
edge  of  the  gulf  planted  the  cross,  inscribed  the  arms 
of  France  upon  a  tree,  buried  a  leaden  plate  of  posses- 
sion in  the  earth  and  sang  to  the  skies  "The  banners  of 
heaven's  king  advance,"  La  Salle  in  a  loud  voice  read 
the  proclamation  which  I  have  in  part  repeated.  Thus 
"a  feeble  human  voice,  inaudible  at  half  a  mile,"1  in 
fact  gave  to  France  a  river  and  a  stupendous  territory, 
of  which  Parkman  has  made  this  description  for  the 
title-deed:  "The  fertile  plains  of  Texas,  the  vast  basin 
of  the  Mississippi,  from  its  frozen  springs  to  the  sultry 
borders  of  the  gulf;  from  the  wooded  ridges  of  the 
Alleghanies  to  the  bare  peaks  of  the  Rocky  Mountains 
— a  region  of  savannas  and  forests,  sun-cracked  deserts, 
and  grassy  prairies,  watered  by  a  thousand  rivers, 
ranged  by  a  thousand  warlike  tribes."1  They  gave  it 
to  France.  That,  perhaps,  the  people  of  France  almost 
wish  to  forget.  But  it  is  better  and  more  accurately 
written:  "On  that  day  France,  pioneer  among  nations, 
gave  this  rich,  wide  region  to  the  world." 

1  Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  308. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   RIVER   COLBERT:   A  COURSE   AND   SCENE 
OF   EMPIRE 

A  CHARACTERIZATION  OF  THE  RIVER  WHOSE  EXPLORA- 
TION AND  CONTROL  GAVE  TO  FRANCE  LOUISIANA 
AND  THE    LAND   OF  THE   ILLINOIS 

TO  the  red  barbarian  tribes,  of  which  Parkman 
says  there  were  a  thousand,  the  river  which 
passed  through  their  valley  was  the  "Missis- 
sippi," that  is,  the  Great  Water.  They  must  have 
named  it  so  under  the  compulsion  of  the  awe  in  which 
they  stood  of  some  parts  of  it,  and  not  from  any 
knowledge  of  its  length.  They  must  have  been  im- 
pressed, especially  they  of  the  lower  valley,  as  is  the 
white  man  of  to-day,  by  the  "overwhelming,  unbend- 
ing grandeur  of  the  wonderful  spirit  ruling  the  flow  of 
the  sands,  the  lumping  of  the  banks,  the  unceasing  shift- 
ing of  the  channel  and  the  send  of  the  mighty  flood." 
No  one  tribe  knew  both  its  fountains  and  its  delta, 
its  sources  and  its  mouth.  To  those  midway  of  the 
valley  it  came  out  of  the  mystery  of  the  Land  of  Frosts 
and  passed  silently  on,  or,  in  places,  complainingly  on, 
to  the  mystery  of  the  Land  of  the  Sun,  into  neither  of 
which  dared  they  penetrate  because  of  hostile  tribes. 
While  the  red  men  of  the  Mississippi  lowlands  were 
not  able  as  the  "swamp  angel"  of  to-day  to  discern 
the  rising  of  its  Red  River  tributary  by  the  reddish 

70 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  71 

tinge  of  the  water  in  his  particular  bayou,  or  to  measure 
by  changing  hues,  now  the  impulses  of  the  Wisconsin 
or  of  the  Ohio,  and  now  of  the  richer-silted  blood  of 
the  Rockies  (as  Mr.  Raymond  S.  Spears,  writing  of 
the  river,  has  graphically  described),1  yet  as  they 
gazed  with  wonderment  at  these  changes  of  color,  they 
must  have  had  inward  visions  of  hills  of  red,  green, 
and  blue  earth  somewhere  above  their  own  lodges  or 
hunting-grounds,  and  must  even  have  had  at  times 
some  tangible  message  of  their  brothers  of  the  upper 
waters,  some  fragments  of  their  handiwork,  such  as  a 
broken  canoe,  an  arrow-shaft.  But  the  men  of  the 
sources,  up  toward  the  "swamps  of  the  nests  of  the 
eagles,"  on  the  low  watersheds,  heard  only  vague  re- 
ports of  the  sea  or  gulf;  even  the  Indians  of  Arkansas, 
as  we  read  in  the  account  of  the  De  Soto  expedition, 
could  or  would  "give  no  account  of  the  sea,  and  had 
no  word  in  their  language,  or  idea  or  emblem,  that  could 
make  them  comprehend  a  great  expanse  of  salt  water 
like  the  ocean." 

So  the  river  was  not  the  source  or  father  of  running 
waters,  but  the  great,  awe-inspiring  water.  The  French 
were  misled,  as  we  have  seen,  when  they  first  heard 
Indian  references  to  it,  thinking  it  was  what  they  were 
longing  for — the  western  ocean,  a  great  stretch  of  salt 
water  instead  of  another  and  a  larger  Seine.  And  when 
they  did  discover  that  it  was  a  river,  their  first  concern 
was  not  as  to  what  lay  along  its  course,  but  as  to  where 
it  led. 

A  prominent  American  historian,  to  whom  we  are 

1  "The  Moods  of  the  Mississippi,"  in  Atlantic  Monthly,  102  :  378-382. 
See  also  his  "Camping  on  a  Great  River,"  New  York,  Harper,  1912,  and 
numerous  magazine  articles. 


72  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

much  indebted,  with  Parkman,  for  the  memorials  of 
this  period,  praises  by  contrast  those  who  kept  within 
smell  of  tide-water  along  the  Atlantic  shore.  But 
when  we  reach  the  underlying  motives  of  the  explora- 
tion and  settlement  of  that  continent,  do  they  who 
sought  the  sources  and  the  paths  to  the  smell  of  other 
tide-waters  deserve  dispraise  or  less  praise  than  those 
who  sat  thriftily  by  the  Atlantic  seashore  ? 

The  English  colonists  were  struggling  for  themselves 
and  theirs,  not  for  the  good  or  glory  of  a  country  across 
seas.  They  had  no  reason  to  look  beyond  their  short 
rivers,  so  long  as  their  valleys  were  fruitful  and  ample. 
Shall  they  be  praised  the  more  that  they  did  not  for  a 
century  venture  beyond  the  sources  of  those  streams  ? 
The  first  French  followers  of  the  river  courses  were,  as 
we  have  seen,  devotees  of  a  religion  for  the  salvation 
of  others,  bearers  of  advancing  banners  for  the  glory 
of  France,  and  lovers  of  nature  and  adventure.  And 
if  there  were,  as  there  were,  avaricious  men  among 
them,  we  must  be  careful  not  to  blame  them  more  than 
those  whose  avarice  or  excessive  thrift  was  econom- 
ically more  beneficial  to  the  world  and  to  the  commu- 
nity and  the  colony  and  to  themselves.  Economic 
values  and  moral  virtues,  as  expressed  in  productivity 
of  fields,  mines,  factories,  church  attendance,  and 
obedience  to  the  selectmen,  are  so  easy  of  assessment 
that  it  is  difficult  to  get  just  appraisement  for  those 
who  endured  everything,  not  for  their  own  freedom  or 
gain  but  for  others'  glory,  and  accomplished  so  little 
that  could  be  measured  in  the  terms  of  substantial, 
visible,  tangible,  economic,  or  ecclesiastical  progress. 

Who  first  of  Europeans  looked  upon  this  river  at  the 
gulf  we  do  not  know,  but  on  a  Ptolemy  map,  published 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  73 

in  Venice  in  15 13,  it  is  thought  by  some  that  the  delta 
is  traced  with  distinctness,  as  less  distinctly  in  Waldsee- 
miiller's  map  of  1507.  Five  years  later  (15 18)  on 
Garay's  map  of  Alvarez  de  Pineda's  explorations,  there 
descends  into  the  gulf  a  sourceless  river,  the  Rio  del 
Espiritu  Santo,  which  is  thought  by  some  to  be  the 
same  river  that  Marquette's  map  showed  under  the 
name  de  la  Conception,  ending  its  course  in  the  midst 
of  the  continent;  but  it  is  more  generally  thought  now 
to  be  the  Mobile  River,  and  the  Gulf  del  Espiritu  Santo 
to  be  the  Bay  of  Mobile.  Narvaez,  as  I  have  said, 
tried  a  score  of  years  after  to  enter  the  Mississippi, 
but  he  was  carried  out  to  sea  in  his  flimsy  improvised 
craft,  by  its  resisting  current.  Cabeca  de  Vaca  may  have 
seen  it  again  after  he  left  Narvaez,  but  we  have  no 
record  in  his  narrative  that  distinguishes  it  from  any 
other  river.  Then  came  the  accredited  discoverer  De 
Soto,  who  found  it  but  another  obstacle  in  his  gold- 
seeking  path  toward  the  Ozarks  and  who  found  it 
his  grave  on  his  harassed,  disappointed  journey  back 
toward  Florida. 

It  was  more  than  a  hundred  years  after  "it  pleased 
God  that  the  flood  should  rise,"  as  the  chronicle  has  it, 
and  carry  the  brigantines  built  by  De  Soto's  lieutenant, 
Moscoso,  with  his  emaciated  followers  "down  the 
Great  River  to  the  opening  gulf,"  before  another  white 
face  looked  upon  this  great  water.  It  was  in  1543 
that  Moscoso  and  his  men  disappeared,  sped  on  their 
voyage  by  the  arrows  of  the  aborigines.  It  was  a  June 
day  in  1673  tnat  Marquette  and  Joliet,  coming  down 
the  Wisconsin  from  Green  Bay,  saw  before  them, 
"avec  une  joye  que  je  ne  peux  pas  expliquer,"  the  slow, 
gentle-currented  Mississippi;  or,  as  Mark  Twain  has 


74    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

measured  the  time  in  a  chronology  of  his  own:  "After 
De  Soto  glimpsed  the  river,  a  fraction  short  of  a 
quarter  of  a  century  elapsed,  and  then  Shakespeare  was 
born,  lived  a  trifle  more  than  a  half  a  century, — then 
died;  and  when  he  had  been  in  his  grave  considerably 
more  than  half  a  century,  the  second  white  man  saw 
the  Mississippi."1 

In  1682  La  Salle  followed  it  to  where  it  meets  the 
great  gulf,  possessing  with  emblems  of  empire  and  his 
indomitable  spirit  the  lower  reaches  of  the  stream 
whose  upper  waters  had  first  been  touched  by  the 
gentle  Marquette  and  the  practical  Joliet  and  the  vain- 
glorious Hennepin.  Between  that  day  and  the  time 
when  it  became  a  course  of  regular  and  active  com- 
merce (again  in  Mark  Twain's  chronology),  "seven 
sovereigns  had  occupied  the  throne  of  England,  Amer- 
ica had  become  an  independent  nation,  Louis  XIV 
and  Louis  XV  had  rotted — the  French  monarchy  had 
gone  down  in  the  red  tempest  of  the  Revolution — and 
Napoleon  was  a  name  that  was  beginning  to  be  talked 
about."2  Of  what  befell  in  that  period,  marked  by 
such  figures  and  events,  a  later  chapter  will  tell.  Here 
our  thought  is  of  the  river  itself,  the  river  of  "a  hun- 
dred thousand  affluents,"  as  one  has  characterized 
it;  the  river  which  for  a  little  time  bore  through  the 
valley  of  Louisiana  and  of  the  Illinois  the  name  of 
the  great  French  minister  "Colbert." 

To  the  Spanish  the  river  was  a  hazard,  a  difficulty 
to  be  gotten  over.  To  the  Indian  it  was  the  place  of 
fish  and  defense.  To  the  Anglo-American  empire  of 
wheels,  that  later  came  over  the  mountains,  it  was  a 

1  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  Hillcrest  edition,  pp.  19,  20. 

2  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  p.  20. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  75 

barrier  athwart  the  course,  to  be  ferried  or  forded  or 
bridged,  but  not  to  be  followed.  To  be  sure,  it  was 
(later)  utilized  by  that  empire,  for  a  little  while,  as 
a  path  of  dominant,  noisy  commerce  in  haste  to  get 
its  products  to  market.  And  the  keels  of  commerce 
may  come  again  to  stir  its  waters.  But  the  river  will 
never  be  to  its  later  east-and-west  migrants  what  it 
was  to  the  French,  whose  evangelists,  both  of  empire 
and  of  the  soul,  saw  its  significance,  caught  its  spirit 
into  their  veins,  and  (from  the  day  when  Marquette 
and  Joliet  found  their  courage  roused,  and  their  labor 
of  rowing  from  morning  till  night  sweetened  by  the 
joy  of  their  expedition)  have  possessed  the  river  for 
their  own  and  will  possess  it,  even  though  all  the  land 
belongs  to  others,  and  the  rivers  are  put  to  the  uses  of 
millions  to  whom  the  beautiful  speech  of  the  French 
is  alien.  Many  a  time  in  poling  or  paddling  a  boat  in 
its  tributaries  in  years  gone  by,  have  I  thought  and  said 
to  my  companion:  "How  less  inviting  this  stream 
would  be  if  the  French  with  valiant,  adventurous 
spirit  had  not  first  passed  over  it!"  And  my  com- 
panion was  generally  one  who  was  always  "Tonty" 
to  me.  It  is  still  the  river  of  Marquette  and  Joliet, 
Nicolet,  Groseilliers  and  Radisson,  La  Salle  and  Tonty, 
Hennepin  and  Accau,  Gray  Gowns  and  Black  Gowns, 
Iberville  and  Bienville,  St.  Ange  and  Laclede;  for 
across  every  portage  into  the  valley  of  that  river,  it 
was  the  men  of  France,  so  far  as  we  know,  who  passed, 
first  of  Europeans,  from  Lake  Erie  up  to  Lake  Chau- 
tauqua; or  across  to  Fort  Le  Bceuf  and  down  French 
Creek  into  the  Alleghany  and  the  Ohio  (La  Belle  Ri- 
viere); or  up  the  Maumee  and  across  to  the  Wabash 
(the  Appian  Way) ;  or  from  Lake  Michigan  up  the  St. 


76    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Joseph  and  across  to  the  Kankakee,  at  South  Bend; 
or,  most  trodden  path  of  all,  from  Green  Bay  up  the 
Fox  River  and  across  to  the  Wisconsin;  or  at  Chicago 
from  the  Chicago  River  across  to  the  Des  Plaines  (to 
which  with  the  Illinois  River  the  French  seem  to  have 
given  the  name  "Divine"),  and  so  on  to  the  Mississippi. 

It  is  this  last  approach  that  I  learned  first  and, 
though  a  smoke  now  hangs  habitually  over  the  en- 
trance as  a  curtain,  I  have  for  myself  but  to  push  that 
aside  to  find  the  Divine  River  way  still  the  best  route 
into  the  greatest  valley  of  the  earth.  Man  has  di- 
verted this  Divine  River  to  very  practical  uses,  and 
even  changed  its  name,  but  it  is  hallowed  still  beyond 
all  other  approaches  to  the  Great  River.  In  a  hut  on 
the  portage  Pere  Jacques  Marquette  spent  his  last 
winter  on  earth  in  sickness;  down  the  river  the  brave 
De  la  Salle  built  his  Fort  St.  Louis  on  the  great  rock 
in  the  midst  of  his  prairies,  and  still  farther  down  his 
Fort  Crevecceur.  On  no  other  affluent  stream  are 
there  braver  and  more  stirring  memories  of  French 
adventure  and  sacrifice  than  move  along  those  waters 
or  bivouac  on  those  banks.  And  so  I  would  have  one's 
imagination  take  that  trail  toward  the  Mississippi  and 
first  see  it  glisten  beneath  the  tall  white  cliffs  which 
stand  at  the  portal  of  the  Divine  River  entry. 

Its  branches  are  reputed  to  have  all  borne  at  one 
time  the  names  of  saints,  and  it  had  like  canonization 
itself.  But  these  streams  of  the  Mississippi,  like  the 
Seine,  have  none  or  few  of  the  qualities  that  make  this 
saintly  terminology  appropriate.  It  is  anthropomor- 
phism, not  canonization,  that  befits  its  temper  and  its 
lure.  Mystery  no  longer  hangs  over  its  waters.  Now 
that  all  the  prairie  and  plain  have  been  occupied,  the 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  77 

mystery  has  fled  entirely  from  the  valley  or  has  hidden 
itself  in  the  wilderness  and  "bad  lands."  All  is  trans- 
lated into  the  values  of  a  matter-of-fact,  pragmatic, 
industrial  occupation. 

These  are  some  of  the  pragmatic  and  other  facts 
concerning  it  which  I  have  gathered  from  the  explorers 
and  surveyors  and  lovers  of  this  region,  Ogg1  and 
Austin2  and  Mark  Twain3  among  them. 

Its  length  lies  wholly  within  the  temperate  zone. 
In  this  respect  it  is  more  fortunately  situated  than  the 
more  fertile-valleyed  Amazon,  since  the  climate  here, 
varied  and  sometimes  inhospitable  as  it  is,  offers  con- 
ditions of  human  development  there  denied. 

The  main  stream  is  two  thousand  five  hundred  and 
three  miles  in  length,  or  more  truly  four  thousand  one 
hundred  and  ninety  miles,  if  the  Mississippi  and  Mis- 
souri be  taken;  that  is,  many  times  the  length  of  the 
Seine.  As  Mark  Twain,  who  is  to  be  forever  associated 
with  its  history,  has  said,  it  is  "the  crookedest  river"  in 
the  world,  travelling  "one  thousand  three  hundred  miles 
to  cover  the  same  ground  that  a  crow  would  fly  over 
in  six  hundred  and  seventy-five."  For  a  distance  of 
several  hundred  miles  the  Upper  Mississippi  is  a  mile 
in  width.  Back  in  1882  it  was  seventy  miles  or  more4 
wide  when  the  flood  was  highest,  and  in  191 2  sixty 
miles  wide.  The  volume  of  water  discharged  by  it 
into  the  sea  is  second  only  to  the  Amazon,  and  is  greater 
than  that  of  all  European  rivers  combined — Seine, 
Rhine,  Rhone,  Po,  Danube,  and  all  the  rest,  omitting 

JOgg,  F.  A.,  "Opening  of  the  Mississippi,"  New  York,  1904. 
2  Austin,  O.  P.,  "Steps  in  the  Expansion  of  our  Territory,"  New  York, 
1903. 
8  Mark  Twain,  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  various  editions. 
*  Mark  Twain,  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  p.  456. 


78  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  Volga.  The  amount  is  estimated  at  one  hundred 
and  fifty-nine  cubic  miles  annually — that  is,  it  would  fill 
annually  a  tank  one  hundred  and  fifty-nine  miles  long, 
a  mile  wide,  and  a  mile  high.  With  its  tributaries  it 
provides  somewhat  more  than  sixteen  thousand  miles  of 
navigable  water,  more  than  any  other  system  on  the 
globe  except  the  Amazon,  and  more  than  enough  to 
reach  from  Paris  to  Lake  Superior  by  way  of  Kam- 
chatka and  Alaska — about  three-fourths  of  the  way 
around  the  globe. 

The  sediment  carried  to  the  sea  is  estimated  at  four 
hundred  million  tons1  annually.  As  one  has  put  it,  it 
would  require  daily  for  its  removal  five  hundred  trains 
of  fifty  cars,  each  carrying  fifty  tons,  and  would  make 
two  square  miles  each  year  over  a  hundred  and  thirty 
feet  deep.  Mark  Twain  in  "Life  on  the  Mississippi" 
is  authority  for  the  statement  that  the  muddy  water  of 
the  Missouri  is  more  wholesome  than  other  waters, 
until  it  has  settled,  when  it  is  no  better  than  that  of 
the  Ohio,  for  example.  If  you  let  a  pint  of  it  settle 
you  will  have  three-fourths  of  an  inch  of  mud  in  the 
bottom.     His  advice  is  to  keep  it  stirred  up.2 

The  area  which  it  drains  is  roughly  a  million  and  a 
quarter  square  miles,  or  two-fifths  of  the  United  States. 
That  is,  as  one  graphic  historian  has  visualized  it  in 
European  terms,  Germany,  Austria-Hungary,  France, 
and  Italy  could  be  set  down  within  its  limits  and  there 
would  still  be  some  room  to  spare. 

The  river  has  the  strength  (for  the  most  part  put 
to  no  use)  of  sixty  million  horses.  The  difference  be- 
tween high  water  and  low  water  in  flood  conditions 

1  Humphrey's  and  Abbot's  estimate. 
1  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  p.  182. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  79 

is  in  some  places  fifty  feet,  which  shows  that  it  has  a 
wider  range  of  moodiness  than  even  the  Seine. 

The  rim  dividing  the  Mississippi  basin  from  that  of 
the  Great  Lakes  is,  as  we  have  seen,  low  and  narrow; 
in  some  places,  especially  in  wet  seasons,  the  water- 
shed is  indistinguishable.  The  waters  know  not  which 
way  to  go.  This  fact  furnishes  the  explanation  of  the 
ease  with  which  the  French  explorers  penetrated  the 
valley  from  the  north.  A  high  mountain  range  kept 
the  English  colonists  out  of  it  from  the  east.  The 
Spanish  found  no  physical  barriers  at  the  south  (ex- 
cept the  water,  which  gave  the  Frenchmen  help),  but, 
as  we  have  seen,  on  the  other  hand,  they  found  no  ade- 
quate inducement. 

The  isotherm  which  touches  the  southern  limits  of 
France  passes  midway  between  the  source  and  mouth 
of  the  river.  In  the  northern  half,  it  has  the  mean 
annual  temperature  of  France,  England,  and  Germany; 
in  the  southern  half,  of  the  Mediterranean  coasts. 

From  the  gulf  into  which  it  empties,  a  river  (that  is, 
an  ocean  river,  or  current)  runs  through  the  ocean  to 
the  western  coasts  of  Europe;  another  runs  out  along 
the  northeastern  coast  of  South  America,  and,  still 
another  is  in  waiting  at  the  western  terminus  of  the 
Panama  Canal  to  assist  the  ships  across  the  Pacific. 

A  fair  regularity  and  reliability  of  rainfall  have 
made  the  rich  soil  of  the  valley  tillable  and  productive 
without  irrigation,  except  in  the  far  western  stretches; 
and  these  blessings  are  likely  to  continue,  as  one  au- 
thority puts  it,  "so  long  as  the  earth  continues  to 
revolve  toward  the  east  and  the  present  relationship 
of  ocean  and  continent  continues." 

Including  Texas  and  Alabama  (which  lie  between  the 


80  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

same  ranges  of  mountains  with  this  valley,  though 
their  rivers  run  into  the  gulf  and  not  into  the  Missis- 
sippi), this  valley  has  perhaps  one  hundred  and  forty 
thousand  miles  of  railway,  or  about  sixty  per  cent  of 
the  total  mileage  of  the  country,  or  twenty-five  per 
cent  of  the  mileage  of  the  entire  globe. 

"In  richness  of  soil,  variety  of  climate,  number  and 
value  of  products,  facilities  for  communication  and 
general  conditions  of  wealth  and  prosperity,  the  Mis- 
sissippi Valley  surpasses  anything  known  to  the  Old 
World  as  well  as  the  New."  It  produces  the  bulk  of  the 
world's  cotton  and  oil;  of  corn  it  raises  much  more 
than  all  the  rest  of  the  world  combined,  and  of  each 
of  the  following  (produced  mainly  in  this  same  valley) 
the  United  States  leads  in  quantity  all  the  nations  of 
the  earth:  wheat,  cattle,  hogs,  oats,  hay,  lumber,  coal, 
iron  and  steel,  and  other  mineral  products. 

Its  valley  supports  an  estimated  population  of  over 
fifty  millions,  or  over  half  that  of  the  whole  United 
States;  and  has  an  estimated  maintenance  capacity  of 
from  200,ooo,ooo1  to  350,000,000,2  or  from  four  to 
seven  times  its  present  population.  It  has  been  tilled 
with  "luxurious  carelessness."  A  peasant  in  Brittany 
or  a  forester  in  Normandy  would  be  scandalized  by 
the  extravagant,  profligate  use  of  its  patrimony.  That 
it  is  likely  to  have  at  least  the  250,000,000  by  the  year 
2100,  and  with  intensive  cultivation  will  be  able  to 
support  them,  is  allowed  by  estimates  of  reliable  statis- 
ticians. Europe  had  175,000,000  at  the  beginning  of 
the  nineteenth  century  and  North  America  5,308,000. 

1  Justin  Winsor,  "Mississippi  Basin,"  p.  4. 

2  A.  B.  Hart,  "Future  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,"  Harper'' s  Magazine, 
100  :  419,  February,  1900. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  81 

The  former  has  somewhat  more  than  doubled  its 
population  in  the  century  since;  America  has  increased 
hers  about  twenty  times,  and  the  Mississippi  Valley 
several  thousand  times.  It  is  not  unreasonable  to 
expect  the  doubling  of  the  population  of  that  valley  in 
another  century  and  its  quadrupling  in  two. 

Let  De  Tocqueville  make  summary  of  those  prideful 
items  in  his  description  of  the  valley,  embraced  by 
the  equator-sloping  half  of  the  continent:  "It  is  upon 
the  whole,"  he  says,  "the  most  magnificent  dwelling- 
place  prepared  by  God  for  man's  abode" — a  "space 
of  1,341,649  square  miles — about  six  times  that  of 
France" — watered  by  a  river  "which,  like  a  god  of 
antiquity,  dispenses  both  good  and  evil."1 

And  it  was  still  another  Frenchman  who  first  gave 
to  the  world  an  accurate  description  of  the  sources  of 
the  river.  On  his  own  account,  Nicollet,  sometime 
professor  in  the  College  Louis  le  Grand,  set  out  in 
183 1  to  explore  the  river  from  its  mouth  to  the  source. 
He  spent  five  years  in  these  regions  which  he  de- 
scribed as  "a  grand  empire  possessing  the  grandest 
natural  limits  on  the  earth."  He  then  returned  to  a 
little  Catholic  college  in  Baltimore  as  a  teacher,  but 
the  United  States  Government,  hearing  of  his  valuable 
service,  commissioned  him  to  make  another  expedition 
that  would  enable  him  to  complete  his  map  of  the 
region  of  the  sources.  What  he  then  accomplished  has 
given  him  "distinct  and  conspicuous  place  among  the 
explorers  of  the  Mississippi."  His  map  shows  myriad 
lakes  in  the  region  of  the  sources  (where  the  slightest 
jar  of  earth  might  turn  in  other  directions  the  water  of 
these  brimming  bowls),  so  many  indeed,  that  there 

1  "Democracy  in  America,"  1  :  22,  21,  20.     New  York,  1898. 


82    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

would  seem  to  be  only  lake  and  marsh  and  savannas. 
But  we  see  him  looking  off  toward  plateaus  "looming 
as  if  [they  were]  a  distant  shore."  Another  picture  I 
shall  always  keep  from  his  report  is  of  his  stolid  half- 
breed  guide  (who  usually  waited  for  him  and  his 
companion  with  face  toward  them)  sitting  one  day 
somewhat  ahead  of  the  party  on  a  slight  elevation, 
which  makes  the  watershed  between  the  rivers  of  the 
north  and  the  rivers  of  the  south,  his  face  turned  from 
them,  gazing  in  silent  rapture  upon  the  boundless 
stretch  of  plains. 

How  their  magical  influence  possessed  him,  as  well 
as  that  child  of  forest  and  plain,  Nicollet,  a  peasant 
boy  of  Savoy,  a  professor  in  Paris,  interrupts  his  topo- 
graphical report  to  tell:  "It  is  difficult  to  express  by 
words  the  varied  impressions  which  the  spectacle  of 
these  prairies  produces.  Their  sight  never  wearies. 
To  look  a  prairie  up  or  down,  to  ascend  one  of  its  un- 
dulations, to  reach  a  small  plateau  (or,  as  the  voyageurs 
call  it,  a  prairie  planch e),  moving  from  wave  to  wave 
over  alternate  swells  and  depressions  and  finally  to 
reach  the  vast,  interminable  low  prairie  that  extends 
itself  in  front — (be  it  for  hours,  days  or  weeks) — one 
never  tires;  pleasurable  and  exhilarating  sensations  are 
all  the  time  felt;  ennui  is  never  experienced.  Doubt- 
less there  are  moments  when  excessive  heat,  a  want  of 
fresh  water,  and  other  privations  remind  one  that  life 
is  a  toil;  but  these  drawbacks  are  of  short  duration. 
There  are  no  concealed  dangers — no  difficulties  of  road; 
a  far-spreading  verdure,  relieved  by  a  profusion  of 
variously  colored  flowers,  the  azure  of  the  sky  above, 
or  the  tempest  that  can  be  seen  from  its  beginning  to 
its  end,  the  beautiful  modifications  of  the  changing 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  83 

clouds,  the  curious  looming  of  objects  between  earth 
and  sky,  taxing  the  ingenuity  every  moment  to  rectify 
— all,  everything,  is  calculated  to  excite  the  percep- 
tions and  keep  alive  the  imagination.  In  the  summer 
season,  especially,  everything  upon  the  prairies  is 
cheerful,  graceful,  and  animated.  The  Indians,  with 
herds  of  deer,  antelope  and  buffalo,  give  life  and  motion 
to  them.  It  is  then  they  should  be  visited;  and  I  pity 
the  man  whose  soul  could  remain  unmoved  under  such 
a  scene  of  excitement."1 

It  is  a  singular  fortune  that  has  made  a  son  of 
France,  a  century  and  a  half  after  the  discovery  of  this 
mighty  stream,  the  explorer  and  cartographer  of  its 
sources,  a  fortune  that  has  its  partial  explanation  at 
least  in  the  lure  of  this  stream  for  the  Gallic  heart. 

Mrs.  Trollope,  a  famous  English  traveller,  found  its 
lower  valley  depressing,  as  has  many  another:  "Un- 
wonted to  European  eyes  and  mystically  heavy  is  the 
eternal  gloom  that  seems  to  have  settled  upon  that 
region.  Whatever  wind  may  blow,  however  bright 
and  burning  the  southern  sun  may  blaze  in  the  un- 
clouded sky,  the  stream  is  forever  turbid  and  forever 
dark."  Of  the  scene  at  its  mouth,  where  La  Salle  and 
his  men  had  sung  with  such  joy,  she  says:  "Had  Dante 
seen  it,  he  might  have  drawn  images  of  another  Bolgia 
from  its  horrors."2  But  no  French  visitor,  so  far  as  I 
know,  has  ever  found  it  gloomy,  even  in  flood  or  tem- 
pest on  its  subtropical  stretches;  nor  has  he  found 
those  level  vastnesses  desolate.  A  traveller,  Paul 
Fountain  by  name,  and  so  of  French  origin,  I  suspect, 

1  Report  intended  to  illustrate  a  map  of  the  hydrographical  basin  of  the 
upper  Mississippi  River,  Washington,  1843,  26th  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  Sen. 
Doc.  237,  p.  52. 

2  "Domestic  Manners  of  the  Americans,"  p.  1. 


84  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

wandering  over  those  valley  plains  in  the  early  days, 
tells  of  the  sense  of  freedom,  health,  and  strength  that 
they  give:  "There  is  no  air  like  the  prairie  air — not 
even  the  grand  freshness  of  the  boundless  ocean  itself. — 
The  loveliness  and  variety  of  the  prairie  odors  are  quite 
indescribable,  as  are  its  superb  wild  flowers.  It  is  a 
paradise.  No  man  who  has  lived  on  it  long  enough  to 
know  it  and  love  it  (no  great  time,  I  can  assure  you) 
ever  experiences  real  happiness  after  he  has  left  it. 
There  is  a  longing  and  eager  craving  to  return  to  the 
life.  The  vulgar  cowboys  and  hunters,  uneducated  and 
unpoetical  past  all  degree,  never  leave  it  except  to  get 
drunk.  Their  money  gone,  back  they  go  to  get  fresh 
strength  and  more  pelf  for  another  orgie;  but  if  by 
chance  they  abandon  the  wild,  free  life,  they  soon 
drink  themselves  to  lunacy  or  death,  and  their  last 
babblings  are  of  the  glorious  wilderness  they  all  love."1 
This  is  the  too  exuberant  expression  of  one  who  had 
probably  never  had  a  hearth  of  his  own  in  France,  but 
it  gives  some  intimation  of  the  charm  of  that  great 
and  seemingly  infinite  sweep  of  level  ground,  which 
many,  and  especially  unimaginative  minds,  find  so 
monotonous. 

We  cannot  be  quite  sure,  when  we  listen  to  some 
recent  critics,  that  Chateaubriand  ever  saw  this  great 
valley.  Certainly  we  who  have  grown  up  in  it  have 
never  found  his  reindeer  and  moose  about  our  homes 
(save  in  our  Christmas-time  imaginations).  Paroquets 
that  in  the  woods  repeated  the  words  learned  of  set- 
tlers are  not  of  the  fauna  known  to  reputable  Ohio 
naturalists,  nor  have  two-headed  snakes  been  found 
except  in  the  vision  of  those  who  see  double  in  their 

1  "The  Great  Deserts  and  Forests  of  North  America,"  p.  22. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  85 

intoxication.  The  tamarind  and  the  terebinth  are 
not  of  its  forest-trees.  But  whether  or  not  Chateau- 
briand visited  it  in  person,  his  imagination  had  fre- 
quent residence  upon  the  Mississippi  and  its  tribu- 
taries. His  "Atala"  put  into  French  literature  a 
country  where  many  have  loved  to  dwell,  though  its 
fauna  and  flora  were  not  more  accurate  in  some  re- 
spects than  the  mineralogy  and  meteorology  of  the 
John  Law  scheme,  known  later  as  the  "Mississippi 
Bubble,"  that  made  France  wild  with  excitement  once. 
However,  I  have  recalled  the  fervid  pen  of  Chateau- 
briand, not  as  that  of  a  faunal  or  floral  naturalist,  but 
to  have  it  rewrite  these  sentences:  "Nothing  is  more 
surprising  and  magnificent  than  this  movement  and 
this  distribution  of  the  central  waters  of  North  Amer- 
ica" (whence  flows  the  Mississippi),  "a  river  which  the 
French  first  descended;  a  river  which  flowed  under 
their  power,  and  the  rich  valley  of  which,"  as  the  trans- 
lator has  rendered  it,  "still  regrets  their  genius,"  but, 
as  Chateaubriand  doubtless  meant  it,  and  as  it  is  better 
translated,  "still  grieves  for  their  spirit,"  their  "famil- 
iar" ("et  dont  la  riche  vallee  regrette  encore  leur 
genie  ). 

I  think  that  Chateaubriand  had  accurate  instinct  in 
divining  the  river's  grieving  for  the  spirit  that  (with 
all  the  practical  genius  which  now  inhabits  the  valley) 
is  still  needed  to  give  an  appreciation  of  that  in  the 
valley  which  lies  beyond  the  counting  of  statistics  or 
even  the  glowing  rhetoric  of  the  orators  of  liberty. 

Hamlin  Garland,  reared  in  that  valley,  and  first 
known  in  American  letters  as  the  author  of  remarkable 
stories  of  life  on  a  Western  farm,  "Main  Travelled 

1  "Travels  in  America  and  Italy,"  i  :  72,  73,  London,  1828. 


86    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Roads,"  has  recently  given  expression  to  this  grieving 
(though  he  says  no  word  of  the  French)  in  an  essay  on 
"The  Silent  Mississippi,"  published  a  few  years  ago. 
He  speaks  of  the  river's  bold,  blue-green  bluffs  "look- 
ing away  into  haze,"  of  its  golden  bars  of  sand  "jutting 
out  into  the  burnished  stream,"  of  its  thickets  of  yellow- 
green  willows,  of  the  splendid  old  trees  and  of  its  glades 
opening  away  to  the  hills  (all  making  a  magical  way 
of  beauty),  only  to  use  it  as  a  background  for  the 
statement  that  "not  one  beautiful  building"  is  to  be 
seen  on  its  banks  "for  a  thousand  miles."  There  are 
many  towns,  but  "without  a  single  distinctive  build- 
ing; everything  is  a  flimsy  jumble,  out  of  key,  meaning- 
less, impertinent,  evanescent,  too,  thanks  to  climate." 
"We  took  a  wild  land  beautiful  as  a  dream,"  he  pro- 
ceeds, "and  we  have  made  a  refuse  heap.  The  birds 
of  the  trees  have  disappeared,  the  water-fowl  have 
gone,  every  edible  creature  has  vanished.  An  era  of 
hopeless,  distinctive  vulgarity  is  upon  us." 

I  have  travelled  down  the  smaller  waterways  of 
the  valley  with  like  feeling,  which,  though  it  has  led 
to  no  such  comprehensive  generalization,  yet  gave  me 
a  distinct  consciousness  of  their  "grieving,"  if  not  for 
the  French,  at  any  rate  for  the  silences  that  preceded 
the  French,  and  for  their  own  riparian  architecture. 
The  busy  towns  along  the  streams  I  have  known  have 
turned  their  faces  from  these  streams  toward  the 
railroads.  They  have  left  the  riverside  to  the  thrift- 
less men  and  the  truant  boys.  Stables  and  outhouses 
look  upon  their  waters,  and  the  sewers  pollute  them. 
And  if  on  some  especially  eligible  bluff  better  buildings 
do  stand,  their  owners  or  builders  show  no  apprecia- 
tion of  what  the  bluff  or  river  cares  for,  but  reproduce 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  87 

the  lines  of  some  pretentious  edifice  that  has  no  re- 
lation, historic  or  otherwise,  to  it  or  to  the  site.  The 
old  mills,  with  their  feet  in  the  water,  are  almost  the 
only  sympathetic  structures — especially  so  when  they 
are  in  ruins. 

I  once  followed  the  upper  waters  of  the  stream  (the 
Ohio)  along  which  Celoron,  of  whom  I  shall  speak 
later,  planted  his  emblems  of  French  possession.  He 
would  doubtless  care  to  claim  that  valley  even  to-day, 
though  unsightly  houses  and  sheds  line  it,  and  pipes 
and  shafts  of  iron,  hastily  rigged  up  and  left  to  rust 
when  done  with,  run  everywhere,  and  the  scum  of  oil 
is  on  the  water.  The  profit  of  the  hour  was  all  that  was 
visible  of  motive  or  achievement  in  that  smoky  valley, 
though  I  know  it  is  not  safe  to  generalize,  for  miracles 
have  been  wrought  in  that  very  valley. 

A  change  is  coming  in  many  of  the  towns  and  cities 
of  both  the  lesser  and  the  larger  rivers.  In  the  town 
that  I  knew  best,  thirty  years  ago  only  a  few  ventured 
upon  the  water,  and  they  were  the  fishermen  or  river- 
men  who  had  not  much  to  do  with  the  community  life; 
now  the  steam  or  gasolene  launch  is  making  these 
streams  highways  of  pleasure,  and  so  is  bringing  them 
within  the  daily  life  of  thousands. 

Waiting  for  a  boat  in  St.  Louis  one  beautiful  summer 
morning  on  the  quay,  where  in  Paris  I  should  have 
found  the  book-stalls,  I  saw  a  Pullman  train  just  start- 
ing for  New  York,  and  at  the  water's  edge  under  the 
stately  bridge  one  tramp  "barbering"  another.  But, 
reading  the  morning  paper,  I  found  by  chance  that 
back  in  the  city  there  was  one  man  at  least,  a  teacher 
and  artist,  who  had  the  old-time  French  feeling  for 
the  grieving  river.     It  was  dark  before  I  found  him, 


88  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

after  my  day  on  a  steamboat  whose  most  important 
passenger,  pointed  out  to  me  with  some  apparent  pride 
by  the  old-time  captain,  was  a  brewer,  author  of  a  brew 
more  famous  in  those  parts  than  the  artist's  river  pic- 
tures which  I  saw  by  candle-light  that  night  in  his 
schoolroom. 

The  artist  had  his  river  studio  upon  one  of  the 
beautiful  cliffs  which  La  Salle  must  have  seen  when  he 
came  out  of  the  Illinois  into  the  Mississippi.  And  it 
was  within  a  few  miles  of  that  studio,  it  may  be  added, 
that  I  found,  too,  one  noteworthy  exception  to  Mr. 
Hamlin  Garland's  statement  concerning  riparian  ar- 
chitecture. 

These  are  hopeful  intimations  succeeding  the  fading 
of  the  last  traces  in  that  region  of  the  old  French 
days,  traces  which  I  found  a  few  hours'  journey  below 
St.  Louis,  in  the  village  of  Prairie  du  Rocher  (locally 
pronounced  Prary  de  Roosh);  for  Cahokia,  where  I 
stopped  first,  had  no  mark  of  the  French  regime  ex- 
cept the  "congregation,"  which  was,  as  the  priest  told 
me,  two  hundred  years  old.  The  village  had  no  dis- 
tinctiveness. But  Prairie  du  Rocher  had  its  own 
atmosphere  and  charm.  French  skies  never  produced 
a  more  glorious  August  sunset  than  I  saw  through  the 
Corot  trees  of  that  village,  which  stands  or  reclines 
beneath  the  cliffs  and  looks  off  toward  the  river  that 
has  receded  far  to  the  westward.  I  tried  to  find  the 
old  French  records  of  which  I  had  heard,  but  there 
was  a  new  priest  who  knew  not  the  French;  yet  I  did 
not  need  them  to  assure  me  that  the  French  had  been 
there.  At  dawn,  after  such  a  peaceful  night  as  one 
might  have  in  upper  Carcasonne,  I  found  my  way  to 
the  river  near  which  are  the  ruins  of  Fort  Chartres — 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  89 

all  that  is  left  of  the  greatest  French  fortress  in  the 
Mississippi  Valley,  the  last  to  yield  to  man  and  the 
last  to  surrender  to  nature.  The  town,  Nouvelle 
Chartres,  with  all  its  color  and  gayety,  has  become  a 
corn  field,  and  only  the  magazine  of  the  fort  remains, 
hidden,  a  gunshot  from  the  river,  among  the  weeds, 
bushes,  vines,  and  trees. 

Fourteen  miles  below  is  the  site  of  the  oldest  French 
village  in  the  upper  valley.  But  the  river  was  jealous 
and  took  it  all,  foundation  and  roof,  to  itself.  The 
charms  of  old  Kaskaskia,  the  sometime  capital  of  all 
that  region,  are  "one  with  Nineveh  and  Tyre."  Not 
a  vestige  is  left  of  its  first  days  and  only  a  broken 
structure  or  two  of  its  later  glory. 

Nor  is  there  any  other  trace,  so  far  as  I  could  learn, 
anywhere  down  the  winding  stream  till  one  reaches 
New  Orleans.  The  red  sun-worshippers  in  their  white 
garments — familiar  of  old  to  the  French — even  they 
have  followed  their  divinity  toward  its  setting,  and 
only  among  those  with  African  shadows  in  their  faces 
do  they  still  sing,  as  I  have  heard,  of  the  "brave  days 
of  D'Artaguette."  The  monuments  do  not  remember 
beyond  the  bravery  and  carnage  of  the  Civil  War,  or 
at  farthest  beyond  the  War  of  181 2.  I  was  myself 
apprehended  for  a  foreign  spy  one  day  while  I  was 
searching  too  near  to  the  guns  of  a  present  fort  for 
more  ancient  monuments. 

The  great  river  and  some  of  its  tributaries  have  a 
commerce,  but  it  is  of  an  inanimate  and  unappealing 
kind.  They  no  longer  draw  the  throngs  daily  to  the 
wharfs  as  in  the  days  of  the  glory  of  the  steamboat. 
Everybody  is  in  too  much  of  a  hurry  to  travel  by 
water. 


90    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

An  old  Mississippi  River  steamboat  captain1  has  writ- 
ten a  reminiscent  book,  in  which  he  tells  with  sorrow  of 
the  departed  majesty  and  glory  of  the  river,  the  glamour 
remaining  only  in  the  memories  of  those  who  knew  the 
river  sixty  years  or  more  ago.  He  laments  the  passing 
of  that  mighty  fleet,  destroyed  by  the  very  civiliza- 
tion that  built  it — a  civilization  which  cut  down  the 
impounding  forests  and  so  removed  the  great  natural 
dams  which  must  in  time  be  replaced  by  artificial  ones 
if  the  rivers  are  ever  to  run  full  again  in  the  dry  sea- 
sons and  not  overflow  in  the  wet.  It  is  that  day  of  the 
Mississippi  that  is  best  known  in  our  literature.  Mark 
Twain  has  put  forever  on  the  map  of  letters  (where  the 
Euphrates,  the  Nile,  the  Ilyssus,  the  Tiber,  the  Seine, 
the  Thames  long  have  been)  the  Mississippi,  the  river 
which  the  French  first  traced  upon  the  maps  of  geog- 
raphy. So  we  are  especially  indebted  to  the  French 
for  Mark  Twain,  who  began  his  career  as  a  "cub" 
pilot  on  the  river  which  in  turn  gave  him  the  name  by 
which  the  world  is  ever  to  know  him. 

It  was  he  who  once  wrote  of  this  river:  "The  face  of 
the  water,  in  time,  became  a  wonderful  book — a  book 
that  was  a  dead  language  to  the  uneducated  passenger, 
but  which  told  its  mind  to  me  without  reserve,  deliver- 
ing its  most  cherished  secrets  as  clearly  as  if  it  uttered 
them  with  a  voice.  And  it  was  not  a  book  to  be  read 
once  and  thrown  aside,  for  it  had  a  new  story  to  tell 
every  day.  Throughout  the  long  twelve  hundred  miles 
there  was  never  a  page  that  was  void  of  interest,  never 
one  that  you  could  leave  unread  without  loss,  never 
one  that  you  would  want  to  skip,  thinking  you  could 

'George  B.  Merrick,  "Old  Times  on  the  Upper  Mississippi,"  Cleveland, 
A.  H.  Clark  Co.,  1909. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  91 

find  higher  enjoyment  in  some  other  thing.  There 
never  was  so  wonderful  a  book  written  by  man;  never 
one  whose  interest  was  so  absorbing,  so  unflagging,  so 
sparklingly  renewed  with  every  reperusal."1 

When  I  was  entering  the  English  Channel  on  my 
way  to  Havre,  the  captain  showed  me  what  varied 
courses  must  be  taken  at  different  hours  and  different 
days  to  gain  full  advantage  of  tide  and  current  and 
yet  avoid  all  danger.  But,  as  this  Mississippi  River 
pilot  has  observed,  it  is  now  a  comparatively  easy  un- 
dertaking to  learn  to  run  these  buoyed  and  lighted 
ship  channels;  it  was  then  quite  another  matter 
to  pilot  a  steamboat  in  the  Mississippi  or  Missouri, 
"whose  alluvial  banks  cave  and  change  constantly, 
whose  snags  are  always  hunting  up  new  quarters, 
whose  sand-bars  are  never  at  rest,  whose  channels  are 
forever  dodging  and  shirking,  and  whose  obstructions" 
had  fifty  years  ago  to  be  "confronted  in  all  nights 
and  all  weathers  without  the  aid  of  a  single  lighthouse 
or  a  single  buoy."2  And  yet  that  man,  who  came  to 
know,  in  age,  the  courses  of  human  emotions  the  world 
over,  could,  as  a  young  man,  shut  his  eyes  and  trace 
the  river  from  St.  Louis  to  New  Orleans,  and  read  its 
face  as  one  "would  cull  the  news  from  a  morning  paper." 

It  was  for  years  a  wish  of  mine  that  when  Mark  Twain 
should  come  to  die,  he  should  lie  not  in  an  ordinary 
sepulchre  of  earth  but  in  the  river  which  he  knew  so 
well  and  loved,  and  of  whose  golden  days  he  sang.  I 
wished  that  the  river  might  be  turned  aside  from  its 
wonted  channel,  as  the  River  Busentinus  for  the  inter- 
ment of  Alaric,  and  then,  after  his  burial  there,  be  let 

1  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  pp.  82-83. 

2  "Life  on  the  Mississippi,"  p.  86. 


92  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

back  into  it  again,  that  he  might  ever  hear  the  sonorous 
voice  of  its  waters  above  him,  and,  perhaps,  now  and 
then  the  call  of  the  leadsman  overhead,  crying  the 
depth  beneath,  as  he  himself  in  the  pilot-house  used  once 
to  hear  the  call  "Mark  Twain"  from  the  darkness 
below.  So  it  was  a  disappointment  to  me  that  when 
the  world  followed  him  to  his  grave  it  was  to  a  little 
patch  of  earth  outside  the  valley,  beyond  the  reach  of 
even  the  farthest  tributary  of  the  Mississippi. 

The  great  river  has  been  the  course  of  one  empire 
and  the  scene  of  many.  Spain,  France,  England,  and 
the  United  States  have  each  claimed  its  mastery,  as 
we  have  seen  or  shall  see.  The  Germans  once  dreamed 
of  a  state  on  its  banks,  but  could  not  agree  as  to  the 
locality  (Minnesota  or  Texas),  so  variedly  tempting 
was  the  fertility  of  its  upper  and  its  lower  waters. 
The  sons  of  the  Norsemen  are  now  tilling  the  land 
around  its  sources.  Indeed,  it  has  now  upon  its  banks 
and  within  the  reach  of  its  myriad  streams  a  babel  of 
earth's  races,  although  the  river  has  not,  as  the  River 
of  the  Lotus  Flower,  conformed  them  to  one  uniform 
type. 

We  are  beginning  now  to  realize  more  keenly  that 
the  river  has  yet  to  be  conquered.  It  has  yielded  com- 
plete sovereignty  to  no  people.  It  has  made  light  of 
the  emblems  of  empire.  It  has  even  ignored  the 
white,  channel-marking  signals  of  the  government  that 
now  exercises  lordship  over  all  the  land  it  drains. 
Its  untamed  spirit  flaunts  continual  challenge  in  the 
face  of  all  men.  It  has  had  in  derision  the  building 
of  cities  and  towns.  One  town,  for  example,  has  been 
left  to  choose  between  being  left  high  and  dry  five  miles 
from  water,  or  of  meeting  the  fate  of  old  Kaskaskia. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  93 

And  though  the  town  has  already  thrown  a  million 
dollars  to  the  river,  as  if  to  some  unappeased  god,  the 
river  is  merciless.  One  town  and  another  have  been 
ostracized  or  destroyed,  their  wharfs  left  far  inland 
or  carried  away  to  some  commerceless  bayou.  The 
sentiment  I  have  regarding  the  river  makes  it  difficult 
to  excuse  its  infidelity  toward  one  little  French  town 
in  particular,  St.  Genevieve.  I  can  do  so  only  by  as- 
suming that  the  river  has  cared  less  for  its  later  in- 
habitants than  it  did  for  those  who  gave  it  name.  It 
has  laughed  at  the  embankments  on  which  hundreds 
of  millions  have  been  spent  by  nation,  state,  and  pri- 
vate enterprise  to  keep  its  flood  in  restraint.  Shorn 
of  its  trees,  as  Samson  of  his  long  hair,  it  has  pulled 
down  the  pillars  of  man's  raising  into  its  own  destroy- 
ing waters.  In  1912  a  space  nearly  two  and  a  half 
times  the  size  of  the  State  of  New  Jersey  was  devas- 
tated.1 In  1913  the  loss  in  a  single  year  was  one  hun- 
dred and  sixty  million  dollars.2  In  the  last  thirty 
years  it  is  estimated  the  loss  has  been  a  half  of  a 
billion,  and  it  would  have  been  immensely  greater, 
of  course,  if  the  river  had  not  been  given  unchallenged 
freedom  of  great,  unclaimed  swamps.  And  yet  the 
river  has  never  at  any  one  time  massed  its  great  army 
of  waters.  At  one  time  it  has  been  the  Ohio,  at  an- 
other the  Missouri,  and  then  the  Red  that  it  has  sent 
against  the  fortifications.  If  all  these  streams  were  to 
be  brought  in  flood  at  once  the  lower  valley  would  be 
swept  clean. 

So  it  is  no  martial  simile  that  I  am  using.     It  is  a 
real  battle  that  is  continuously  on.    The  gaunt  sharp- 

1  Seventeen  thousand  six  hundred  and  five  square  miles. 

8  One  hundred  and  sixty-three  million,  U.  S.  Weather  Bureau  estimate. 


94  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

shooter,  pacing  the  embankment  with  Winchester  in 
hand  to  shoot  any  burrowing  confederate  of  the  river, 
a  rat,  or  mole,  is  a  real  and  not  an  imaginary  figure. 
And  the  battles  that  have  been  fought  along  its  course 
are  as  play  by  the  side  of  those  yet  to  be  waged  before 
it  is  subdued  by  man. 

It  is  fitly  the  War  Department  of  the  government 
that  has  been  watching  its  every  movement,  that  has  set 
the  signals  on  its  fitful  tide,  and  that  has  recorded  its 
every  shift  for  years  as  if  it  were  an  animate  enemy. 
Its  changing  area,  velocity,  discharge — items  of  in- 
finite permutations — are  all  noted  and  analyzed.  But 
the  war  department  of  the  government  is  still  almost 
as  powerless  to  control  the  river  as  the  Yazoo  farmer 
who  watches  its  changing  moods,  not  by  instruments 
but  by  the  movement  of  an  eddy  in  his  own  hidden 
bayou.  The  battle  is  with  floods,  shallows,  and  ero- 
sion, but  it  is  essentially  a  battle  with  floods,  for  not 
until  their  strongholds  are  taken,  controlled,  is  the 
complete  conquest  assured.  It  was  control  of  the 
mouth  of  the  river  that  seemed  so  important  in  early 
days.  The  effort  to  obtain  that  led  ultimately  to  the 
purchase  of  Louisiana  (that  is,  the  west  bank  of  the 
river)  from  the  French  by  the  United  States.  It  was 
the  confirmation  of  that  security  of  navigation  which 
gave  the  battle  of  New  Orleans  its  high  significance. 
Then  the  mouth  (thus  obtained)  was  found  too  shal- 
low for  the  demands  of  commerce,  and  there  followed 
what  some  one  with  poetic  instincts  has  called  the 
battle  of  the  shoals,  a  battle  in  which  General  Eads, 
who  had  bridged  the  river  at  St.  Louis,  compelled 
the  river  by  means  of  jetties  to  run  deeper  and  carry 
heavier  burdens. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  95 

But  the  future  battle-fields  are  perceived  to  lie 
toward  the  sources,  at  the  eaves,  as  it  were,  of  the 
watersheds,  the  headwaters  of  its  tributaries  as  well 
as  its  own.  No  deepening,  embanking,  straightening, 
canalization  of  the  river  is  to  be  permanently  effective 
until  all  danger  of  flood  can  be  removed. 

Wandering  among  those  tributaries,  seeing  the 
trickling  fountains  of  several  of  them,  watching  the 
timid  stream  in  the  naked,  deforested  fields  (not  know- 
ing quite  which  way  to  go,  east  or  west,  north  or  south), 
I  have  been  strongly  appealed  to  by  the  plan  of  im- 
pounding in  reservoirs  these  first  waters,  whose  freedom 
(no  longer  restrained  in  youth  by  the  sage  forests) 
makes  them  libertines  and  wantons  in  the  distant  val- 
leys below. 

Such  impounding  has  successful  inauguration  in  five 
small  reservoirs  now  in  operation  on  the  headwaters 
of  the  Mississippi  out  of  forty-two  planned.  An  am- 
bitious plan  for  controlling  the  turbulent  Ohio  by  a  sys- 
tem of  from  seventeen  to  forty-three  reservoirs  at  an 
estimated  cost  of  from  twenty  to  thirty-four  millions 
of  dollars  has  been  suggested  by  Mr.  M.  O.  Leighton 
of  the  United  States  Geological  Survey,  and  received 
indorsement  from  the  Pittsburgh  Flood  Commission,  the 
Dayton  Flood  Commission,  and  the  National  Waterways 
Commission.  These  would  suffice  to  keep  the  lawless 
waters  within  temperate  bounds  in  the  spring  and  to 
give  more  generous  navigable  currents  in  the  summer 
and  autumn.  Against  the  great  expense  of  such  a 
project  is  set  the  tremendous  possibilities  in  the  devel- 
opment of  water-power.  Of  the  theoretical  sixty  mil- 
lions of  horse-power  in  the  current  of  the  Mississippi, 
it  is  estimated  that  about  six  and  a  half  millions  can 


96    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

be  economically  developed  throughout  the  year,  while 
twelve  millions  could  be  developed  during  six  months 
or  more  without  storage  reservoirs.  An  adequate  sys- 
tem of  reservoirs  might  double  or  treble  these  totals, 
while  a  million  or  two  would  be  immediately  available 
to  begin  the  payment  of  the  debt,  and  more  of  the 
strength  would  be  harnessed  to  that  purpose  in  time. 
So,  it  is  urged,  the  river  would  be  made  to  meet  the 
expense  of  its  own  conquest.1 

And  once  that  is  done  the  river  may  be  straightened, 
shortened,  deepened,  leveed,  and  made  a  docile,  re- 
liable carrier  of  commerce.  It  may  then  be  compelled 
to  a  respect  for  cities  and  government  signals  and 
wharfs  and  mills.  And  the  astute  suggestion  of  the 
practical  Joliet  for  the  canalization  of  its  waters,  may 
be  realized  in  the  safe  passage  not  merely  of  boats  but 
of  stately,  giant,  ocean-sized  vessels  from  the  Great 
Lakes  to  the  gulf. 

A  hundred  years  ago  (1809)  one  Nicholas  Roosevelt, 
commissioned  of  Robert  Fulton  (the  inventor  of  the 
steamboat)  and  others,  was  sent  to  Pittsburgh  to  build 
the  first  steamboat  to  be  launched  in  western  waters. 
So  confident  was  this  young  man  of  the  success  of 
steamboat  navigation  of  the  Ohio  and  Mississippi  that, 
on  his  journey  of  inspection,  he  purchased  coal-mines 
along  the  way  and  arranged  to  have  the  coal  piled  up 
on  the  river  bank  against  the  time  of  its  need  by  boats 
whose  keels  had  not  been  laid  and  whose  existence  even 
depended  upon  the  approval  of  eastern  capitalists. 
It   suggests   the   prevision   of  the   nephew,   Theodore 

1  See  reports  of  the  National  Conservation  Commission  in  1909;  National 
Waterways  Commission,  1912;  Report  Commissioner  of  Corporations  on 
Water-Power  Development  in  the  United  States,  1912;  J.  L.  Mathews 
"Remaking  the  Mississippi,"  Boston,  1909. 


THE  RIVER  COLBERT  97 

Roosevelt,  in  making  provision  for  the  coaling  of  ships 
in  the  east  long  before  the  Spanish  War  was  in  sight. 
I  was  on  the  Marquette-Joliet  portage  the  very  day 
that  this  same  nephew  was  predicting  with  like  con- 
fidence to  the  people  of  St.  Louis  that  the  Mississippi 
would  be  deepened  till  from  the  lakes  to  the  gulf  it 
should  be  a  course  for  seagoing  vessels.  Champlain 
suggested  the  Panama  Canal  three  hundred  years  be- 
fore its  building.  Joliet,  in  1673,  suggested  the  lakes-to- 
the-gulf  ship  waterway,1  and  by  the  three-hundredth 
anniversary,  perhaps,  it  will  be  completed. 

I  made  a  journey  in  191 1  that  began  at  the  first 
settlements  of  the  French  in  Nova  Scotia,  touched  the 
Bay  of  Chaleur  and  the  lower  St.  Lawrence,  and  then 
followed  the  French  water  paths  all  the  way  to  the 
mouth  of  the  Mississippi,  where  the  master  of  pilots, 
a  descendant  of  France,  carried  me  out  into  the  Gulf 
of  Mexico.  Starting  back  before  dawn  in  a  little  boat, 
I  saw,  just  as  the  sun  was  coming  up  over  the  swamps 
where  the  river  begins  to  divide,  the  hulk  of  a  great 
seagoing  vessel  against  the  morning  sky.  It  seemed 
then  a  gloomy  apparition;  but  as  I  think  of  it  now  it 
was  rather  the  presage  of  the  new  commerce  than  the 
ghost  of  that  which  has  departed. 

That  the  Valley  of  a  Hundred  Thousand  Streams — 
streams  that  together  touch  every  community  of  any 
size  from  the  Alleghanies  to  the  Rockies — streams 
whose  waters  all  find  their  way  sooner  or  later  into 
the  Mississippi — will  ever  give  up  battle  till  the  great 
water  itself  is  conquered,  no  one  who  knows  the  de- 
termined people  in  that  valley  will  ever  question. 
The  sixty  million  people  will  not  be  resisted  perma- 

1  Margry,  I  :  268. 


98    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

nently  by  the  sixty  million  horses  of  the  river,  though 
the  strength  of  the  horses  be  driven  by  all  the  clouds 
that  the  gulf  sends  up  the  valley  to  its  aid.  Some  day 
the  great,  free  River  Colbert  will  run  vexed  of  impene- 
trable, unyielding  walls  to  the  sea.  Its  "titanic  am- 
bition for  quiet  flowing"  down  this  beautiful,  gently 
sloping  valley  to  the  gulf  (which,  as  one  has  said,  "has 
been  its  longing  through  ages")  will  have  been  turned 
to  human  ministry.  The  spirit  of  the  great  water 
will  have  become  as  patient,  as  thoughtless  of  its  own 
wild  comfort  or  ambitions  as  that  of  the  priest  who 
dedicated  it  to  the  honor  of  the  mother  of  the  most 
patient  of  men. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE   PASSING  OF   NEW  FRANCE   AND  THE 
DREAM  OF   ITS   REVIVAL 

THE  readers  who  have  through  these  chapters 
been  companions  of  Champlain,  La  Salle, 
Joliet,  Marquette,  and  others  in  the  discovery 
of  the  mighty  rivers  and  the  conquest  of  the  mighty 
vastnesses  of  the  new  world  will  have,  if  they  con- 
tinue, yet  before  them  even  harder  and  more  dis- 
heartening ventures,  as  La  Salle  himself  had  that 
April  day  in  1682,  when  he  turned  from  the  column 
which  he  had  planted  in  sight  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico, 
four  thousand  miles  from  the  Cape  of  Labrador,  and 
began  to  drive  his  canoes  up  the  river  which  he  had 
traced  forever,  if  too  tortuously,  on  the  maps  of  the 
earth. 

During  the  chapter  since  we  reached  the  shores  of 
that  lonely  sea  without  a  sail,  we  have,  covering  in 
prospect  two  centuries,  contemplated  the  majesty  of 
that  river  of  a  hundred  thousand  affluents. 

Now,  as  we  turn  our  faces  toward  the  lakes  and 
Canada  again,  a  century  of  hardship  confronts  us.  If 
the  readers  endure  it  with  me,  as  I  have  endured  it 
again  and  again,  they  will  have  added  again  to  their 
France  and  their  United  States  memories  more  precious 
than  the  titles  to  boundless  prairies  and  trackless  forests. 

La  Salle  was  not  content  with  the  discovery  of  the 

99 


ioo    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

great  waterway  to  the  gulf,  the  tracing  of  whose  course 
had  ended  all  dreams  of  a  shorter  route  to  China  by 
aid  of  its  current.  In  place  of  his  La  Chine  dream  grew 
another  dream:  to  open  this  valley  to  France  from  the 
south  instead  of  from  the  north,  where  the  way  was 
long  and  perilous,  closed  half  the  year  by  ice  and 
storm,  and  beset  all  the  year  by  hostile  intrigue,  envy, 
and  dishonesty  of  colonial  officials.  A  Franco-Indian 
colony  was  to  be  established  along  the  Illinois  under 
the  protection  of  Fort  St.  Louis  on  the  Rock.  Ulti- 
mately a  chain  of  forts  and  colonies  would  hold  the 
watercourse  all  the  way  from  gulf  to  gulf — from  the 
Gulf  of  St.  Lawrence  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico — main- 
tained by  revenues  from  the  hides  and  wool  of  the 
buffalo  then  roaming  the  woods  and  prairies  and  plains 
from  one  side  of  the  valley  to  the  other;  the  Indians 
would  gather  about  these  centres  for  gain  and  pro- 
tection; and  in  the  midst  of  this  wilderness  he  would 
hold  for  France  the  empire  that  the  inscription  on  the 
column  at  the  mouth  of  the  river  claimed.  The  crows 
might  fly  about  his  fields,  but  they  could  not  then 
touch  his  rich  crops.  Griffins — flocks,  fleets  of  griffins 
— would  fly  above  them. 

That  was  the  vision  with  which  he  started  north- 
ward from  the  mouth  of  the  great  river,  the  vision 
out  of  which  he  might  at  once  have  been  starved  ex- 
cept for  the  meat  of  alligators  shot  along  the  way. 
Seized  of  a  dangerous  illness,  he  sent  Tonty  on  to 
Mackinaw  to  forward  news  of  the  discovery  to  Canada, 
and  unable,  even  after  months  of  Father  Membre's 
care,  to  go  to  Paris  to  prepare  for  the  carrying  out  of 
his  great  scheme,  he,  joined  by  Tonty,  climbs  the 
Rock  St.  Louis  and  lays  out  ramparts  on  its  crest,  of 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  101 

which  I  thought  I  discovered  traces  many  years  ago. 
It  was  another  Rock  of  Quebec,  rising  sheer  a  hundred 
and  twenty-five  feet  above  the  river  in  the  midst  of 
the  prairie.  About  it  gathered  under  his  protection 
many  tribes  of  Indians,  in  common  dread  of  the  Iro- 
quois, in  common  hope,  doubtless,  of  gain  from  com- 
merce with  the  French.  La  Salle,  in  a  report  to  be 
found  in  the  archives  of  the  Marine  in  Paris,  states 
that  his  extemporized  colony  numbered  four  thousand 
warriors,  or  twenty  thousand  souls.1  It  had  come  up 
as  Jonah's  gourd  and  might  as  quickly  wither,  as  the 
village  of  the  Illinois  but  a  few  years  previous  had 
withered  into  desolation  in  a  few  hours  before  the  hot 
breath  of  the  terrorizing  fame  of  the  Iroquois.  From 
his  seigniorial  aerie  he  sent  messages  to  the  governor 
of  Canada,  no  longer  the  friendly  Frontenac  but  a 
Pharaoh  who  knew  not  this  Joseph,  praying  for  co- 
operation, saying  that  he  could  not  leave  his  red  allies 
lest,  if  the  Iroquois  should  strike  in  his  absence,  they 
would  think  him  in  league  with  their  dread  enemies; 
asking  that  his  men  who  go  down  with  hides  in  ex- 
change for  munitions  be  not  retained  as  outlaws; 
urging  that  it  is  for  the  advantage  of  his  creditors  (for 
his  losses  had  amounted  to  forty  thousand  crowns) 
that  they  do  not  seize  his  goods — since  the  means  of 
meeting  all  his  debts  would  then  be  destroyed — and 
begging  for  more  men  with  whom  to  make  this  colony 
permanent  and  gather  the  more  remote  Indian  tribes 
around  the  sheltering  Rock  St.  Louis.2 

But  it  was  not  such  prayers  that  reached  Louis  XIV, 
who,  on  May  10,  1682,  before  La  Salle's  report  of  the 

1Margry,  2  :  363.     Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  pp.  317,  318. 
sMargry,  2  :  314.     Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  pp.  320-324. 


102     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

discovery  of  the  Mississippi  arrived  at  Versailles,  had 
directed  that  no  further  permission  should  be  given  to 
make  journeys  of  discovery  toward  the  Mississippi,  as 
the  colonists  might  better  be  employed  in  cultivating 
the  lands. 

This  is  an  example  of  the  advice  the  king  is  receiv- 
ing from  his  governor  in  Quebec:  "You  will  see  that 
.  .  .  [La  Salle]  has  been  bold  enough  to  give  you  in- 
telligence of  a  false  discovery  and  that,  instead  of  re- 
turning to  the  colony  to  learn  what  the  King  wishes 
him  to  do,  he  does  not  come  near  me,  but  keeps  in 
the  backwoods,  five  hundred  leagues  off,  with  the  idea 
of  attracting  the  inhabitants  to  him,  and  building  up 
an  imaginary  kingdom  for  himself,  by  debauching  all 
the  bankrupts  and  idlers  of  this  country,  .  .  .  All  the 
men  who  brought  me  news  from  him  have  abandoned 
him,  and  say  not  a  word  about  returning,  but  sell  the 
furs  they  have  brought  as  if  they  were  their  own;  so 
that  he  cannot  hold  his  ground  much  longer."1 

Meanwhile  the  king,  the  same  king  who  five  years 
before  had  said  in  La  Salle's  commission  that  he  had 
"nothing  more  at  heart"  than  the  exploration  of  that 
country,  writes  to  the  governor  of  Canada  from  Fon- 
tainebleau:  "I  am  convinced,  as  you,  that  the  dis- 
covery of  the  Sieur  de  la  Salle  is  very  useless,  and 
that  such  enterprises  ought  to  be  prevented  in  the 
future."2 

In  his  extremity,  his  supplies  cut  off,  his  men  sent 
to  Quebec  deserting  with  the  profits  of  his  hides,  La 
Salle  leaves  Tonty  on  the  Rock,  starts  for  Quebec, 
intending  to  go  to  France,  meets  on  the  way  an  officer 
appointed  to  succeed  him  in  all  his  wilderness  author- 

^arkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  323.  2Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  324. 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  103 

ity,  and  in  the  spring  of  1684  is  again  a  lodger  in  Rue 
de  la  Truanderie,  a  miserable  little  street  in  Paris  where, 
as  I  have  said  before,  I  have  tried  to  locate  the  lodging 
of  the  valiant  soul  who  once  dwelt  upon  the  mysterious 
rock  near  my  boyhood  home. 

Thence  this  man  of  "solitary  disposition,"  whose 
life  had  been  joined  to  savages,  and  who  had  for  years 
had  "neither  servants,  clothes  nor  fare  which  did  not 
savor  more  of  meanness  than  of  ostentation,"  and  who 
was  of  such  natural  timidity  that  it  took  him  a  week 
"to  make  up  his  mind  to  go  to  an  audience"  with 
Monseigneur  de  Conti,  is  summoned  to  an  interview 
with  the  king  himself. 

La  Salle's  memorials,  which  recall  by  way  of  intro- 
duction his  five  journeys  of  upward  of  five  thousand 
leagues,  in  great  part  on  foot,  through  more  than  six 
hundred  leagues  of  unknown  country  among  savages 
and  cannibals,  and  at  the  cost  of  one  hundred  and 
fifty  thousand  francs,  and  which  propose  projects  that 
seem  in  some  of  their  features  quixotic  and  visionary, 
received  favorable  consideration  of  the  king  and  his 
minister  Colbert's  son.  La  Salle's  wilderness  empire  is 
restored  to  him  and  he  is  granted  four  ships  in  which 
to  carry  soldiers,  mechanics,  and  laborers  to  establish 
a  fort  and  colony  at  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi, 
to  open  up  all  the  interior  of  America  from  the  south, 
and  incidentally  to  make  war  on  the  Spaniards  (who 
were  claiming  the  gulf  for  their  own),  and  to  seize  their 
valuable  mines. 

The  quarrellings  of  this  expedition  (due  in  part  to 
the  divided  command) ;  the  failure  to  find  the  mouth  of 
the  Mississippi  since,  we  are  told,  La  Salle  had  been 
unable  in  1682  to  determine  its  longitude;  the  landing 


104    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

on  the  shores  of  Texas,  far  beyond  the  mouth  of  the 
Mississippi;  the  loss  of  one  of  the  vessels  to  the  Span- 
ish, the  wreck  of  two  others,  and  the  return  of  the 
fourth  to  France;  the  miserable  fate  of  the  colony 
left  on  those  desolate  shores;  the  long  search  of  La 
Salle  and  his  companions  for  the  "fatal  river" — these 
make  a  dismal  story  whose  details  cannot  be  rehearsed 
here,  a  story  whose  tragic  end  was  the  murder  of 
La  Salle  by  one  of  his  own  disaffected  followers  in 
March,  1687,  on  the  banks  of  the  Trinity  River. 

There  is  time,  as  we  hasten  on,  for  only  a  few  words 
over  the  body  of  this  "iron  man,"  left  "a  prey  to  the 
buzzards  and  wolves"  of  the  wilderness  in  which  he 
sacrificed  all,  as  Champlain,  for  France. 

"One  of  the  greatest  men  of  his  age,"  said  Tonty,  who 
was  nearest  to  him  in  all  his  labors  save  his  last.  "With- 
out question  one  of  the  most  remarkable  explorers 
whose  names  live  in  history,"  writes  Parkman.1  His 
"personality  is  impressed  in  some  respects  more  strongly 
than  that  of  any  other  upon  the  history  of  New  France," 
says  another  historian,  Fiske.2  "  For  force  of  will  and 
vast  conceptions;  for  various  knowledge  and  quick 
adaptation  of  his  genius  to  untried  circumstances;  for 
a  sublime  magnanimity,  that  resigned  itself  to  the  will 
of  Heaven,  and  yet  triumphed  over  affliction  by  energy 
of  purpose  and  unfaltering  hope — this  daring  adven- 
turer had  no  superior  among  his  countrymen,"  says 
Bancroft.3  And  further,  in  the  estimate  of  a  recent 
historian  of  the  valley,  "for  all  the  qualities  of  rugged 
manhood,  courage,  persistency  that  could  not  be  broken, 

1  Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  430. 

2  "New  France  and  New  England,"  p.  132. 

3  "History  of  the  United  States,"  3  :  173. 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  105 

contempt  of  pain  and  hardship,  he  has  never  been  sur- 
passed."1 

Let  him  who  next  to  Tonty  knew  him  better  than 
all  the  other  chroniclers  say  a  last  word — one  which 
will  justify  the  time  that  we  have  given  to  following 
the  fortunes  and  adversities  of  this  spirit,  unbroken  to 
the  last:  "He  was  a  tower  of  adamant,  against  whose 
impregnable  front  hardship  and  danger,  the  rage  of 
man  and  of  the  elements,  the  southern  sun,  the  north- 
ern blast,  fatigue,  famine,  disease,  delay,  disappoint- 
ment and  deferred  hope,  emptied  their  quivers  in 
vain.  .  .  .  Never  under  the  impenetrable  mail  of 
paladin  or  crusader  beat  a  heart  of  more  intrepid 
mettle  than  within  the  stoic  panoply  that  armed  the 
breast  of  La  Salle.  To  estimate  aright  the  marvels  of 
his  patient  fortitude,  one  must  follow  on  his  track 
through  the  vast  scene  of  his  interminable  journey- 
ings.  .  .  .  America  owes  him  an  enduring  memory; 
for  in  this  masculine  figure  she  sees  the  pioneer  who 
guided  her  to  her  richest  heritage."2 

France  had  deserved  well  of  that  valley  had  she 
done  nothing  more  than  to  set  that  rugged,  fearless 
figure  in  the  heart  of  America,  a  perpetual  foil  to 
effeminacy  and  submission  to  softening  luxury,  to  the 
arts  that  seek  merely  popularity,  to  drunkenness  and 
other  vices  which  he  combated  even  in  that  wilder- 
ness, to  sycophancy  and  demagogy — a  perpetual  ex- 
ample of  the  "vir"  and  virtue  in  the  noblest  sense  in 
which  mankind  has  defined  them. 

In  the  grand  amphitheatre  in  the  Sorbonne,  I  wit- 
nessed one  day  in  Paris  a  celebration  of  the  conquests 

'James  K.  Hosmer,  "Short  History  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,"  p.  140. 
'Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  432. 


106     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

of  the  French  language  in  lands  outside  of  France: 
conquests  in  the  islands  of  the  West  Indies,  where  La 
Salle  suffered  all  but  death;  in  Canada,  where  he  had 
his  first  visions;  and  in  Louisiana,  where  he  perished. 
Though  his  name  was  not  spoken,  it  were  a  reason  for 
greater  celebration  in  France  that  the  spirit  of  such  a 
Frenchman  as  La  Salle  had  enduring  memory  in  the 
severe  ideals  of  manhood  that  are  for  all  time  to  pos- 
sess the  men  of  that  valley  to  which  he  guided  the 
world. 

There  is  a  grave  for  which  I  wished  to  make  search 
in  Rouen,  the  grave  of  the  mother  of  La  Salle,  to  whom 
he  wrote  in  1684:  "I  hope  ...  to  embrace  you  a  year 
hence  with  all  the  pleasure  that  the  most  grateful  of 
children  can  feel  with  so  good  a  mother  as  you  have 
always  been."1  I  wish  I  could  have  made  her  know — 
but  since  I  could  not,  I  tried  to  let  France  know  in- 
stead— that  there  are  millions  who  could  speak  to-day 
as  the  most  "grateful  of  children"  what  her  son  and 
France's  son  was  never  permitted  to  utter. 

La  Salle's  dream  of  New  France  did  not  fade  with 
his  last  sight  of  his  empire  of  Louisiana.  But  the  cen- 
tury in  which  he  was  born  and  died  had  all  but  gone 
out  before  the  stirring  of  his  life's  vision  and  sacrifice, 
strengthened  by  appeal  of  the  gallant  and  faithful  Tonty, 
resulted  in  the  offer  by  one  who  has  been  called  the 
"Cid  of  Canada,"  Le  Moyne  dTberville,  to  carry  out 
the  schemes  of  La  Salle,  and  it  was  becoming  clear 
that  France  must  act  at  once  or  England  would  build 
the  glorious  structure  which  La  Salle  had  designed. 
In  the  offer  of  this  young  Canadian  and  his  brother 
Bienville   were   the    purposes    that    gave   substantial 

^arkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  364. 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  107 

foundation  to  Louisiana.  Sailing  with  their  two  ships 
in  1699,  they  were  caught  in  the  "strong,  muddy 
current  of  fresh  water,"  which  La  Salle  had  unluckily 
passed  without  seeing.  They  entered  this  stream 
and,  after  several  days  of  exploration,  had  verification 
of  the  identity  of  the  river  in  a  letter  (or  "speaking 
bark,"  as  the  Indians  called  it),  dated  the  20th  of  April, 
1685,  which  Tonty,  years  before,  when  making  the 
journey  down  the  river  in  search  of  La  Salle,  had  left 
in  the  hands  of  an  Indian  chief  to  be  delivered  to  La 
Salle,  or,  as  the  chief  called  him,  "the  man  who  should 
come  up  the  river." 

The  fortunes  which  befell  those  of  this  colony,  trying 
to  find  a  suitable  site  in  that  land  of  bushes  and  cane- 
brakes,  are  not  agreeable  to  follow.  For  thirteen  years 
the  "paternal  providence  of  Versailles"  watched  over 
them,  sending  them  marriageable  women,  soldiers, 
priests,  and  nuns,  but  so  little  food  that  famine  and 
pestilence  often  came  to  their  miserable  stockades. 
They  were  under  injunction  "to  seek  out  pearl  fish- 
eries," "to  catch  bison-calves,  tame  them  and  take 
their  wool,"  and  "to  look  for  mines."  What  employ- 
ment for  the  founders  of  an  empire  I1 

One  cannot  resist  the  temptation  to  say  again:  If 
only  Louis  XIV  had  had  the  good  sense,  unblinded  of 
pearls  and  gold  and  bigotry  and  some  other  things,  to 
let  the  industrious,  skilled  Huguenots,  flying  from 
France  after  the  revocation  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes, 

1  In  one  of  the  branches  of  that  river  at  whose  mouth  they  settled  I  saw 
a  summer  or  two  ago,  one  of  the  men  of  that  valley  wading  in  its  water, 
still  in  search  of  pearls.  A  pearl  worth  a  thousand  dollars  had  once  been 
found  near  by,  and  so  (in  the  same  hope  that  animated  the  mind  of  King 
Louis  XIV)  man  after  man  in  that  neighborhood  had  abandoned  his  fertile 
farm  to  search  for  pearls,  only  to  be  reduced,  as  the  poor  settlers  of  early 
Louisiana,  to  live  upon  the  shell-fish  in  which  the  pearls  refused  to  grow. 


108     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

settle  in  Louisiana,  instead  of  forcing  them  to  swell 
the  numbers  of  the  English  colonies  on  the  Atlantic 
coast,  and  eventually  assist  them  in  taking  the  New 
France  from  which  they  had  been  debarred ! 

The  French  engineer  of  an  English  ship,  appearing 
on  the  river  one  day,  had  furtively  handed  Bienville 
a  petition  of  four  hundred  Huguenots  in  the  Carolinas 
to  be  allowed  to  settle  in  Louisiana  and  to  have  the 
privilege  of  worship,  such  as  is  enjoyed  to-day.  The 
answer  came  from  Versailles  to  the  cane-brakes — from 
Versailles,  where,  amid  scenes  "which  no  European 
court  could  rival,"  the  "greatest  of  France,  princes, 
warriors,  statesmen,"  were  gathered  week  after  week 
in  the  "Halls  of  Abundance,  Venus,  Mars  and  Apollo," 
from  Versailles  to  the  half-starved  little  group  sitting 
in  exile  by  the  gulf,  far  from  abundance,  without  love, 
in  dread  of  Mars,  and  with  no  arts  of  Apollo  save  the 
sound  of  the  wind  in  the  trees  and  the  moan  of  the  sea: 
"Have  I  expelled  heretics  from  France  in  order  that 
they  should  set  up  a  republic  in  America  ?" 

One  has  reminded  us  that  while  Iberville  was  mak- 
ing almost  futile  attempts  with  the  half-hearted  sup- 
port of  his  government  to  establish  this  colony  at  the 
mouth  of  the  Mississippi,  Peter  the  Great  was  beginning 
to  lay  the  foundations  of  St.  Petersburg  in  as  unprom- 
ising a  place — a  barren,  uncultivated  island  which  was 
a  frozen  swamp  in  winter  and  a  heap  of  mud  in  summer, 
in  the  midst  of  pathless  forests  and  deep  morasses 
haunted  by  wolves  and  bears.  Peter  the  Great  spent 
great  treasure  in  clearing  the  forests,  draining  the 
swamps,  and  raising  embankments  for  this  future 
capital  of  an  empire.  Louis  XIV  had  only  to  let  cer- 
tain Frenchmen  settle  on  these  less  forbidding  coasts, 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  109 

that  might  soon  have  become  the  capital  of  as  fruitful 
a  province  as  Peter  the  Great's;  and  the  transforma- 
tion would  have  been  made,  as  in  New  England,  with- 
out any  assistance  from  the  king  except  perhaps  for 
defense. 

It  is  due  the  memory  of  Iberville,  often  slandered 
as  was  La  Salle  before  him,  not  that  the  story  of  his 
all  but  hopeless  struggles  should  be  repeated  here  but 
that  the  object  toward  which  he  so  valiantly  struggled 
should  be  clearly  seen.  He  had  read  Father  Membre's 
account  of  the  La  Salle  voyage  of  discovery  and  Joutel's 
story  of  the  last  expedition.  He  had  even  had  a  con- 
versation with  La  Salle,  and  had  heard  his  own  lips 
describe  the  river;  and  he  had  known  Tonty  of  the 
Iron  Hand,  faithful  to  the  last.  Iberville  had  a  mind 
capable  of  entertaining  the  vision,  and  he  had  a  spirit 
capable  of  following  it.  He  seems  to  have  been  for  a 
time  after  La  Salle's  death  his  only  great-minded  fol- 
lower. He  wrote  on  reaching  Rochelle  after  his  first 
voyage  that  "  if  France  does  not  immediately  seize  this 
part  of  America,  which  is  the  most  beautiful,  and  estab- 
lish a  colony  strong  enough  to  resist  any  which  England 
may  have  here,  the  English  colonies  (already  consider- 
able in  Carolina)  will  so  thrive  that  in  less  than  a  hun- 
dred years  they  will  be  strong  enough  to  seize  all 
America."1 

But  the  answer  from  Versailles  only  hastened  the 
fulfilment  of  Iberville's  prophecy.  It  is  as  a  page  torn 
from  a  contemporaneous  suburban  villa  prospectus 
that  speaks  of  one  of  those  migratory  settlements  of 
Iberville  on  the  shores  of  the  gulf  as  a  "terrestrial 
paradise,"  a  "Pomona,"  or  "The  Fortunate  Island." 

1Margry,  I.  c,  IV:  322. 


no  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

And  the  reality  which  confronts  the  home  seeker  is 
usually  more  nearly  true  to  the  idealistic  details  than 
that  which  Governor  Cadillac,  wishing  no  doubt  to 
discredit  his  predecessor,  reported  when  he  went  to 
succeed  Bienville  for  a  time  as  governor:  "I  have  seen 
the  garden  on  Dauphin  Island,  which  had  been  de- 
scribed to  me  as  a  terrestrial  paradise.  I  saw  there 
three  seedling  pear-trees,  three  seedling  apple-trees,  a 
little  plum-tree  about  three  feet  high,  with  seven  bad 
plums  on  it,  a  vine  some  thirty  feet  long,  with  nine 
bunches  of  grapes,  some  of  them  withered,  or  rotten, 
and  some  partly  ripe,  about  forty  plants  of  French 
melons  and  a  few  pumpkins."1 

Bienville,  the  brother,  also  deserves  remembrance 
both  in  France  and  America — dismissed  once  but 
exonerated,  returning  later  to  succeed  the  pessimistic 
Cadillac  and  to  lay  the  foundations  of  New  Orleans 
on  the  only  dry  spot  he  had  found  on  his  first  journey 
up  the  river,  there  to  plant  the  seed  of  the  fruits 
and  melons  and  pumpkins  of  the  garden  on  Dauphin 
Island,  that  were  to  bring  forth  millionfold,  though 
they  have  not  yet  entirely  crowded  out  the  cypress 
and  the  palmetto,  and  the  fleur-de-lis  that  still  grows 
wild  and  flowers  brilliantly  at  certain  seasons. 

It  was  some  time  before  this,  however,  that  the  king, 
nearing  the  end  of  his  days,  vexed  with  his  wars,  tired 
of  his  expensive  and  unproductive  venture,  gave  over 
the  colony  into  the  hands  and  enterprise  of  a  specu- 
lator, one  Antoine  Crozat,  a  French  merchant  whose 
purse  had  been  open  to  Louis  for  his  wars.  There  was 
a  total  population  at  this  juncture  (171 2)  of  three  hun- 
dred and  eighty  souls,  about  one  half  of  whom  were 

'Parkraan,  "A  Half  Century  of  Conflict,"  I  :  309. 


THE  PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  in 

"in  the  king's  pay."  Crozat,  the  king's  deputy  despot, 
finds  no  better  fortune  than  the  king,  and  soon  (1717) 
resigns  his  charter,  to  be  succeeded  in  his  anxieties 
and  privileges  by  that  famous  Scotch  adventurer  John 
Law,  who  organized  the  Mississippi  Company  in  order 
to  enjoy  the  varied  monopolies  assembled  in  its  charter 
— monopolies  which  would  make  any  inhabitant  of 
that  trust-hating  valley  to-day  fume  in  denouncing. 
It  was  a  tobacco  trust,  a  coinage  trust,  a  revenue  trust, 
a  slave-holding  trust,  a  mining  trust,  a  trade  trust 
wrapped  in  one,  with  an  unlimited  license.  It  was, 
moreover,  a  conscience  trust,  a  speech  trust,  a  religion 
trust,  a  race  trust.  It  was,  in  short,  the  ultimate, 
sublimated  expression  of  a  monopolistic  theory  made 
effective  in  a  charter.  Immigration,  within  these  re- 
strictions, was  not  likely  to  be  voluntary  and  eager,  as 
was  the  case  in  New  England,  and,  since  the  company 
was  under  the  one  compulsion  of  providing  a  certain 
number  of  colonists  and  slaves,  immigration  was  forced. 
Every  conceivable  sound  economic  and  philosophical 
principle  was  violated,  and  yet  investors  came  from 
all  parts  of  Europe.  "Crowds  of  crazed  speculators 
jostled  and  fought  each  other"  before  the  offices  of  the 
company  in  the  Rue  Quincampoix1  from  morning  till 
night  to  get  their  names  inscribed  among  the  stock- 
holders, and,  though  five  hundred  thousand  foreigners 
were  attracted  to  Paris  by  opportunities  for  speculation, 
scarcely  a  colonist  went  willingly  to  the  Eldorado  of 
the  company,  whose  stock  was  capitalized  in  billions 
and  "whose  ingots  of  gold  were  displayed  in  Paris  shop- 
windows."    There  were  maps  of  that  valley  to  be  found 

1 A  now  disreputable  street,  or  so  it  seemed  as  I  walked  through  it  one 
day  in  the  dusk. 


ii2     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

in  abundance  in  Paris  in  those  days  with  mines  indi- 
cated on  them  indiscriminately.  When  the  bubble 
burst,  Louisiana  "became  a  name  of  disgust  and  ter- 
ror" in  Europe,  and  doubtless  thousands  hoped  never 
to  hear  the  word  "Mississippi"  again,  and  yet  it  was 
only  time  that  was  needed  to  make  even  such  wild 
prophecies  true. 

The  monopolistic  venture  failed.  Many  of  the 
colonists  whom  the  company  entered  died  or  ran  away; 
millions  of  pounds  had  been  spent,  there  was  no  return, 
and  there  was  little  tangible  to  show  for  it  all — a  few 
thousand  white  settlers,  many  of  whom,  in  a  phrase 
current  to-day  in  the  States,  were  "undesirable 
citizens,"  living  in  palisaded  cabins.  So  the  little 
settlement  became  a  crown  colony  again  and  came 
back  to  the  king,  but  not  to  him  in  whose  name  it 
had  been  originally  taken,  for  that  king  was  dead. 
Louis  XIV's  name,  kept  in  "Louisiana,"  claims  now 
but  a  fragment  of  that  vast  territory  which  might  have 
been  his  forever.  The  little  outcast  colony  was  laid 
on  the  steps  of  Versailles  again,  and  was  again  subject 
to  "paternalistic  nursing,"  because  of  or  in  despite  of 
which  it  began  at  last  to  show  signs  of  growth.  It 
was  at  the  cost  of  a  half-century  of  time,  of  eight  or 
more  millions  of  livres  to  the  king,  Crozat  and  the 
company,  of  millions  upon  millions  more  to  those  who 
bought  the  worthless  stock  of  the  Mississippi  Company, 
and  of  ignominy  and  shame,  that  La  Salle's  dream 
began  to  have  realization,  while  on  the  Atlantic  sea- 
board the  English  colonies  were  growing  luxuriantly  in 
comparative  neglect. 

Meanwhile  French  explorers  were  traversing  this 
mighty  interior  valley  with  all  the  spirit  of  Cartier, 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  113 

Joliet,  Champlain,  and  La  Salle.  Pierre  Charles  le 
Sueur  had  ascended  the  Mississippi  far  toward  its 
source  in  search  of  copper  and  lead.  Bernard  de  la 
Harpe  and  Louis  Juchereau,  the  Sieur  de  St.  Denis, 
explored  the  Red  River  and  penetrated  as  far  as  the 
Spanish  settlement  of  St.  Jean  Baptiste  on  the  Rio 
Grande.  Each  might  have  a  volume.  The  turbid  Mis- 
souri even  (which  Marquette  and  Joliet  first  saw  head- 
ing great  trees  down  into  the  Mississippi)  was  not  passed 
by  as  impervious  to  the  hardihood  of  undaunted,  am- 
phibious geographers  such  as  La  Harpe  and  Du  Tisne. 

Two  brothers,  Pierre  and  Paul  Mallet,  penetrated  to 
the  old  Spanish  settlement  at  Santa  Fe  and  may  have 
been  the  first  of  Frenchmen  to  see  the  farther  bound- 
ary of  the  valley,  the  Rocky  Mountains.  Whether 
they  did  or  not,  it  is  certain  that  far  to  the  northwest 
two  other  brothers  did  reach  that  mighty  range  and 
"discovered  that  part  of  it  to  which  the  name  Rocky 
Mountains  properly  belongs." 

The  brothers  La  Verendrye  in  1735,  two  centuries 
after  Cartier,  were  still  looking  for  a  way  to  the  western 
sea  (Mer  de  l'Ouest).  With  their  father  these  sons 
ventured  their  lives  and  gave  their  fortunes  to  the  ex- 
ploration of  the  northwest  out  beyond  Lake  Supe- 
rior, out  past  the  ranch  where  a  century  and  a  half 
later  President  Roosevelt  wrote  the  "Winning  of  the 
West,"  out  to  or  beyond  the  edge  of  what  is  now  the 
great  Yellowstone  National  Park,  anticipating  by  more 
than  sixty  years  the  first  stages  of  the  famous  Lewis 
and  Clark  expedition.  The  snow  covered  the  peaks  of 
the  Big  Horn  Mountains,  but  the  party  probably 
forced  a  way  to  the  Wind  River  Range  before  they  re- 
luctantly turned  back  from  the  foot  of  the  mountains, 


ii4     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

disappointedly  fancying  that  they  might  have  seen  the 
Pacific  if  they  could  have  reached  the  summits. 

It  is  not  far  from  the  place  where  they  began  their 
homeward  journey  that  I  have  seen  two  trickling 
streams,  within  a  few  yards  of  each  other,  start,  one 
toward  the  gulf  and  one  toward  the  Pacific — but  the 
latter  had  seven  or  eight  hundred  miles  of  mountain 
and  forest  to  pass  before  it  could  touch  what  the 
Verendrye  brothers  hoped  to  see.  Yet,  though  they, 
as  Cartier,  Champlain,  Nicolet,  La  Salle,  and  scores  of 
others  did  not  find  the  way  to  the  western  sea,  their 
unappreciated,  heroic  efforts  made  at  their  own  ex- 
pense stretched  the  line  of  French  forts  all  the  way 
across  the  valley  from  sea  to  mountain  range,  com- 
pleting, as  one  historian  has  represented  it,  a  T,  but 
as  it  seems  to  me  rather  a  cross,  with  a  perpendicular 
column  reaching  from  the  gulf  to  Hudson's  Bay,  and 
its  transverse  strip  from  the  Big  Horn  Mountains  to 
Cape  Breton.  Or  so  it  stood  for  a  day  in  the  world's 
history,  raised  by  unspeakable  suffering,  a  vision  once 
seen  never  to  be  forgotten. 

Chevalier  de  la  Verendrye,  who  had  seen,  first  of 
white  men,  the  snow-capped  mountains,  "sank  into 
poverty  and  neglect,"  and  finally  perished  in  the  ship- 
wreck off  the  island  of  Cape  Breton.  So  was  the  whole 
east  and  west  line  of  French  pioneering  retraced  and 
extended  in  the  life  of  one  hardy  French  family.1 

And  as  to  the  north  and  south  line,  every  year  saw 
its  foundations  and  strength  increase  as  if  it  were  a 
a   growing    tree.     Along   the   Mississippi,   forts   were 

1  Parkman,  "The  Discovery  of  the  Rocky  Mountains,"  in  Atlantic 
Monthly,  6\  :  783-793.  "A  Half  Century  of  Conflict,"  2  :  4-43.  Thwaites, 
"A  Brief  History  of  Rocky  Mountain  Exploration,"  pp.  26-36. 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  115 

planted  and  Jesuit  and  Sulpician  missions  grew.  The 
Illinois  country  enjoyed  a  "boom,"  as  we  say  in 
America,  even  in  those  days,  and  became  known  for  a 
time  as  the  Garden  of  New  France;  but  only  for  a 
time,  for  it  was  so  easy  to  earn  a  livelihood  there 
that  it  was  not  long  before  the  habitants  reverted,  un- 
der temptation,  to  the  preagricultural,  hunting  state 
after  giving  a  moment's  prophecy  of  the  stirring  life 
that  was  some  day  to  make  it  the  garden  of  the  new 
world,  the  busiest  spot  in  the  busy  world. 

There  are  glimpses  here  and  there  of  gayety  and 
halcyon  days  that  give  brightness  to  the  story  so  full 
of  tragedy.  There  was  in  the  very  heart  of  the  valley 
(near  the  site  of  St.  Louis,  where  a  great  world's  fair  was 
held  a  few  years  ago),  Fort  Chartres,  mentioned  above, 
"the  centre  of  life  and  fashion  in  the  West"  as  well  as 
"a  bulwark  against  Spain  and  a  barrier  to  England."1 
But  in  time  the  Indians,  stirred  by  the  English  rivalry, 
swarmed  as  well  as  mosquitoes  about  the  place>  and 
there  were  battles,  the  echoes  of  which  are  still  heard, 
we  are  told,  in  the  regions  south  of  St.  Louis  even  in 
our  days.  A  young  French  officer,  the  Chevalier 
d'Artaguette,  captured  by  the  Chickasaws,  was  burned 
at  the  stake.  He  and  his  kin  were  loved  by  all  the 
French  and  the  song  they  used  to  sing  of  him  is  kept 
in  a  negro  melody  whose  "oft-repeated  chorus"  ran: 

"In  the  days  of  D'Artaguette, 
He!    Ho!    He! 
It  was  the  good  old  time. 
The  world  was  led  straight  with  a  switch, 
He!    Ho!    He! 

1  See  Edward  G.  Mason,  "Old  Fort  Chartres,"  In  his  "Chapters  from  Il- 
linois History,"  1901. 


n6  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Then  there  were  no  negroes,  no  ribbons, 
No  diamonds 
For  the  vulgar. 
He!    Ho!    He!" 

And  here  even  in  this  remote  place  premonitions  of 
the  great  and  imminent  struggle  with  the  English  are 
ominously  heard.  We  hear  the  governor-general  of 
Canada,  the  Marquis  de  la  Galissonniere,  asking  the 
home  government  in  France  not  to  leave  the  little 
colony  of  Illinois  to  perish — not  for  its  own  sake,  but 
"else  Canada  and  Louisiana  would  fall  apart";  still 
urging,  moreover,  the  value  for  fabrics  of  the  wool  of 
buffaloes,  which  roam  the  prairies  in  innumerable  mul- 
titudes, the  readiness  of  the  earth  for  the  plough,  and 
the  availability  of  the  buffalo  as  a  domestic  animal. 
"If  caught  and  attached  to  a  plough,"  says  the  gov- 
ernor, who  spoke  truthfully  but  with  little  knowledge 
of  this  wild  animal,  "it  would  move  it  at  a  speed  superior 
to  that  of  the  domestic  ox."  I  do  not  know  how  ap- 
pealing this  harnessing  of  the  original  motive  power  of 
the  prairie  to  the  uses  of  agriculture  was,  and  it  is  not 
of  importance  now.  The  buffalo  has  long  since  gone. 
Even  the  ox  and  the  Norman  horse,  so  long  in  use 
there,  have  been  largely  supplanted  by  that  mysterious 
force,  electricity,  which  Franklin  was  discovering  on 
the  other  side  of  the  Alleghany  Mountains  at  the  very 
time  that  this  suggestion  was  being  made  to  the  min- 
ister of  Louis  XV.  It  is  known,  however,  that  the 
king  took  thought  of  the  little  Illinois  colony,  for  the 
fort  of  wood  was  transformed  under  the  direction  of 
Chevalier  de  Macarty  into  a  fortress  of  stone  and 
garrisoned  by  nearly  a  regiment  of  French  troops.  A 
million  crowns  it  cost  the  king,  but  this  could  not  have 


THE  PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  117 

distressed  his  Majesty,  engaged  in  "throwing  dice  with 
piles  of  Louis  d'or  before  him"  and  princes  about  him. 

This  was  in  the  early  fifties,  and  the  fort  was  hardly 
transformed  before  the  rifles  of  George  Washington's 
men  were  heard  from  the  eastern  barriers  disputing 
the  claim  of  the  French  to  the  Ohio  country.  Ju- 
monville,  who  was  slain  among  the  rocks  of  the  Laurel 
Mountains,  in  the  Alleghanies  (killed  in  the  opening 
skirmish  of  the  final  struggle),  had  a  young  brother, 
Neyon  de  Villiers,  a  captain  in  Chevalier  de  Macarty's 
garrison  at  Fort  Chartres;  and  eastward  he  hastened, 
up  the  Ohio,  to  avenge  his  brother's  death.  "M.  de 
Wachenston"  (as  the  name  appears  in  French  des- 
patches) was  driven  back,  and  so  the  "Old  French 
War"  in  America  began. 

It  was  from  this  mid-continent  fortress  and  its  fer- 
tile environs  that  help  in  arms  and  rations  went  to  the 
support  of  that  final  struggle  along  the  mountains  and 
lakes,  even  as  far  as  La  Salle's  old  Fort  Niagara,  where 
the  valiant  Aubry,  at  the  head  of  his  Illinois  expedition, 
fell  covered  with  wounds  and  many  of  his  men  were 
killed  or  taken  prisoners.  That  was  about  all  that 
one  in  the  interior  of  the  valley  heard  of  the  battles  of 
the  Seven  Years'  War  out  upon  its  edges. 

What  gives  peculiar  interest  in  this  fortress  to  us 
to-day  is  that  it  was  for  a  little  time  the  only  place  in 
North  America  where  the  flag  of  the  French  was  flying. 
All  New  France  had  been  ceded  by  the  treaty  of  Paris 
in  1763,  but  the  little  garrison  of  forty  men  still  held 
Fort  Chartres.  Pontiac  and  other  friendly  Indians 
intercepted  all  approaching  English  forces  till,  in  1765 
(two  years  after  the  treaty  of  Paris  and  the  cession 
of  Canada  and  all  the  valley  east  of  the  Mississippi), 


n8  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

St.  Ange,  the  commander,  announced  to  Pontiac, 
friendly  to  the  end,  that  all  was  over,  that  "Onontio, 
their  great  French  father,"  could  no  longer  help  his 
red  children,  that  he  was  beyond  the  sea  and  could  not 
hear,  and  that  he,  Pontiac,  must  make  peace  with  the 
English.  Then  it  was  that  the  forty-second  High- 
landers, the  "Black  Watch,"  were  permitted  to  enter 
the  fort  and  to  put  the  red  cross  of  St.  George  in  place 
of  the  fleur-de-lis.  And  so  it  was  at  Fort  Chartres 
that  the  mighty  struggle  ended  and  that  the  titular 
life  of  the  great  empire  of  France  in  the  new  world 
actually  went  out. 

The  river,  seemingly  sentient,  and  still  French,  as  I 
have  said,  soon  swept  away  the  site  of  the  village 
outside  the  fort;  and  when  the  English  had  begun  to 
look  upon  this  as  their  permanent  headquarters  in  the 
northwest — this  fort,  which  Captain  Pittman  had  re- 
ported to  be  the  best-built  fort  in  America — the  still 
hostile  river  rose  one  night,  and  with  its  "resistless 
flood"  tore  away  a  bastion  and  a  part  of  the  river  wall, 
then  moved  its  channel  away,  and  left  the  fort  a  mile 
inland. 

The  magazine  still  stands,  or  did  a  little  time  ago 
when  I  visited  the  site  and  found  it  nearly  hidden  by 
the  trees,  bushes,  and  weeds — all  that  is  visibly  left  of 
the  old  French  domain — and  not  far  away,  hidden 
at  the  foot  of  a  hill,  lies,  as  I  have  said,  the  village 
of  Prairie  du  Rocher,  "a  little  piece  of  old  France 
transplanted  to  the  Mississippi"  a  century  and  a  half 
ago  and  forgotten. 

It  was  on  Champlain's  cliff  and  beneath  Carder's 
Mount  Royal  that  the  unequal  contest  for  the  pos- 
session of  America  ended,  where  it  began — a  contest 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  119 

whose  story,  as  Parkman  says,  in  a  sense  demeaning 
his  own  great  contribution,  "would  have  been  a  his- 
tory, if  faults  of  constitution  and  the  bigotry  and  folly 
of  rulers  had  not  dwarfed  it  to  an  episode."  But  if  it 
was  an  episode  to  the  New  Englander,  or  even  to 
Frenchmen  at  the  distance  in  time  at  which  I  write, 
it  rises  to  the  importance  of  history  out  in  that  region 
of  America,  where  a  century  of  unexampled  fortitude 
needs  rather  an  epic  poet  than  a  historian  to  give  it 
its  place  in  the  world's  consciousness. 

Indeed,  historians  of  the  United  States  to-day,  as 
well  as  statesmen  of  that  time,  are  in  substantial 
agreement  in  this:  That  the  presence  of  the  French  on 
all  the  colonial  borders  compelled  a  confederation  of 
the  varying  interests  of  the  several  English  colonies, 
kept  them  penned  in  between  the  mountains  and  the 
sea  until  there  had  been  developed  some  degree  of 
solidarity,  some  ability  to  act  together;  and  then  by 
the  sudden,  if  compulsory,  withdrawal  of  the  pressure 
not  only  allowed  their  expansion  but  relieved  them  of 
all  need  of  help  from  England  and  so  of  dependence 
upon  her. 

"We  have  caught  them  at  last,"  said  Louis  XV's 
minister,  Choiseul,  speaking  of  the  treaty  of  Paris 
in  1763.1  Burke2  prophesied  that  the  removal  of 
France  from  North  America  would  precipitate,  as  it 
did,  the  division  of  the  British  Empire.  And  Richard 
Henry  Greene,  the  great  English  historian,  dates  the 
foundation  of  the  great  independent  republic  of  the 
west  (the  United  States)  from  the  triumph  of  Wolfe 
on  the  Heights  of  Abraham. 

1  Bancroft,  "History  of  the  United  States,"  4  :  460. 

2  William  Burke,  "Remarks  on  the  Letter  Addressed  to  Two  Great  Men." 


120    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

It  is  interesting  testimony  in  support  of  this  fear  of 
the  eventual  loss  of  all  the  colonies  in  such  a  cession, 
or  such  an  acceptance,  that  the  English  commis- 
sioners debated  long  whether  it  might  be  more  profit- 
able to  retain  the  little  island  of  Guadeloupe  instead 
of  all  New  France.  And  it  would  appear  that  except 
for  the  advice  of  Benjamin  Franklin  this  substitution 
would  probably  have  been  made. 

France,  then,  having  borne  the  brunt  of  conflict 
with  nature  and  the  natives  in  that  valley,  having  re- 
vealed the  riches  of  that  valley  to  the  world,  having 
consecrated  its  entire  length  and  breadth  by  high  valor 
and  sacrifice,  having  possessed  that  valley  practically 
to  the  very  eve  of  the  birth  of  the  nation  that  now 
occupies  it,  and  having  helped  by  substantial  aid  the 
struggling  colonies  to  their  independence,  deserves  (not 
through  her  monarchs  or  ministers  chiefly,  but  through 
the  new-world  pioneers,  who  gave  illustration  of  the 
spirit  and  stuff*  of  Frenchmen)  a  lasting  and  a  large 
share  of  credit  for  the  establishment  of  the  republic 
which  has  its  most  vigorous  life  in  that  valley. 

New  France  has  passed  and  New  England,  too,  but 
in  their  stead  the  new  republic,  recruited  from  all 
nations  under  heaven,  ties  their  lost  dominions  into  a 
power  which  is  immensely  greater  than  the  sum  of 
the  two  could  have  been,  greater  than  it  could  have 
been  in  the  hands  of  either  alone. 

There  was  for  a  little  time  a  dream  of  the  revival 
of  New  France  out  beyond  the  Mississippi,  for  there 
was  a  vast  part  of  that  valley  that  did  not  pass  to  En- 
gland in  1763.  The  great  territory  between  the  Mis- 
sissippi and  the  mountains,  whose  "snow-encumbered'" 
peaks  the  Verendrye  brothers  had  so  longingly  looked 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  121 

upon,  was  abandoned  to  Spain,  or  rather  thrust  upon 
Spain,  already  claiming  it.  France  wanted  to  give  it 
to  England  in  order  that  Florida  might  be  saved  to 
Spain,  her  ally,  but  England  did  not  hesitate  as  she  did 
in  making  choice  between  the  eastern  half  of  the  valley 
and  Guadeloupe.  She  declined.  So  with  an  apparent 
magnanimity,  which  is  greatly  to  be  discounted  when 
we  come  to  know  how  worthless  even  the  people  of 
the  United  States,  years  later,  considered  this  trans- 
Mississippi  country,  France,  "secretly  tired  of  her 
colony,"  finally  induced  Spain  to  accept  it.  The 
Spanish  monarch,  as  if  making  the  best  of  a  bad  bar- 
gain, took  it  with  many  excuses  for  his  seemingly  poor 
judgment. 

But  though  Louis's  minister,  Choiseul,  chuckled  out- 
wardly over  the  embarrassment  to  England  of  his 
compulsory  cession  of  Canada,  New  France,  Illinois, 
and  Louisiana  (instead  of  Guadeloupe)  and  made  a 
show  of  magnanimity  in  thrusting  the  other  half 
of  the  Mississippi  upon  Spain,  and  though  Turgot's 
simile  between  colonies  and  ripe  fruit  was  often  re- 
peated for  justification  and  consolation,  the  loss  of 
these  possessions  was  undoubtedly  keenly  felt  and  the 
dream  of  their  recovery  cherished;  at  any  rate,  the  re- 
covery of  that  part  which  lay  beyond  the  Mississippi. 

But  that  possession  had  become  more  precious  to 
the  sovereign  of  Spain,  who  refused  the  proffers  that 
France  was  able  to  make  in  the  next  thirty  years. 
The  dream  of  repossession  became  fonder  to  the 
French  republic.  Talleyrand,  who  had  spent  a  year 
in  travel  in  the  United  States,  urged  the  acquisition  not 
merely  for  France's  own  sake  but  to  curb  the  ambitions 
of  the  Americans,  "whose  conduct  ever  since  the  mo- 


122     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

ment  of  their  independence  is  enough  to  prove  this 
truth:  the  Americans  are  devoured  by  pride,  ambition, 
and  cupidity." 

"There  are,"  he  said,  "no  other  means  of  putting 
an  end  to  the  ambition  of  the  Americans  than  that  of 
shutting  them  up  within  the  limits  which  nature  seems 
to  have  traced  for  them;  but  Spain  is  not  in  a  con- 
dition to  do  this  great  work  alone.  She  cannot,  there- 
fore, hasten  too  quickly  to  engage  the  aid  of  a  pre- 
ponderating power,  yielding  to  it  a  small  part  of  her 
immense  domains  in  order  to  preserve  the  rest." 

"Let  the  court  of  Madrid  cede  these  districts  to 
France  and  from  that  moment  the  power  of  America 
is  bounded  by  the  limit  which  it  may  suit  the  inter- 
ests and  the  tranquillity  of  France  and  Spain  to  assign 
her.  The  French  Republic  .  .  .  will  be  a  wall  of  brass 
forever  impenetrable  to  the  combined  efforts  of  En- 
gland and  America."1 

If  in  Napoleon's  mind  the  dream  was  as  sinister,  as 
regards  the  United  States,  it  was  not  so  for  long.  It 
contemplated  at  first  the  occupation  of  Santo  Domin- 
go, the  quelling  of  the  insurrection  there,  then  the  seiz- 
ure of  Louisiana,  already  promised  to  France  by  Spain, 
then  the  acquisition  of  Florida,  the  conversion  of  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico  into  a  French  lake,  and  ultimately  the 
extension  of  the  province  of  Louisiana  to  the  Alle- 
ghanies  and,  perhaps,  even  to  the  old  borders  of  New 
France  along  the  Great  Lakes  and  the  St.  Lawrence. 
But  plague  and  slaughter  met  his  armies  in  Santo  Do- 
mingo in  the  first  step  toward  the  realization  of  his  vast 
design,  and  the  vision,  in  the  shifting  light  of  events 
in  Europe  and  on  the  shores  of  America  as  well,  soon 

1  Quoted  in  Henry  Adams's  "History  of  the  United  States,"  I  :  357. 


THE  PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  123 

assumed  other  shape  and  color  and  at  last  disappeared 
entirely,  supplanted  by  the  vision  of  a  strengthened 
American  republic  that  would  come  to  be  a  rival  of 
England.  This  was  what  came  (in  his  own  language) 
instead  of  his  dream  of  a  New  France  beyond  the 
Mississippi,  beyond  the  American  republic: 

"I  know  the  full  value  of  Louisiana,  and  I  have  been 
desirous  of  repairing  the  fault  of  the  French  negotiator 
who  abandoned  it  in  1763.  A  few  lines  of  a  treaty  have 
restored  it  to  me,  and  I  have  scarcely  recovered  it 
when  I  must  expect  to  lose  it.  But  if  it  escapes  from 
me,  it  shall  one  day  cost  dearer  to  those  who  oblige 
me  to  strip  myself  of  it  than  to  those  to  whom  I  wish 
to  deliver  it.  The  English  have  successfully  taken 
from  France,  Canada,  Cape  Breton,  Newfoundland, 
Nova  Scotia,  and  the  richest  portions  of  Asia.  They 
are  engaged  in  exciting  troubles  in  St.  Domingo. 
They  shall  not  have  the  Mississippi  which  they  covet. 
Louisiana  is  nothing  in  comparison  with  their  conquests 
in  all  parts  of  the  globe,  and  yet  the  jealousy  they  feel 
at  the  restoration  of  this  colony  to  the  sovereignty  of 
France  acquaints  me  with  their  wish  to  take  posses- 
sion of  it,  and  it  is  thus  that  they  will  begin  the  war. 
...  I  think  of  ceding  it  to  the  United  States.  I  can 
scarcely  say  that  I  cede  it  to  them,  for  it  is  not  yet  in 
our  possession.  If,  however,  I  leave  the  least  time  to 
our  enemies,  I  shall  only  transmit  an  empty  title  to 
those  republicans  whose  friendship  I  seek.  They  only 
ask  of  me  one  town  in  Louisiana,  but  I  already  consider 
the  colony  as  entirely  lost,  and  it  appears  to  me  that 
in  the  hands  of  this  growing  power,  it  will  be  more 
useful  to  the  policy  and  even  to  the  commerce  of 
France  than  if  I  should  attempt  to  keep  it."1 

1  Marbois,  "History  of  Louisiana,"  pp.  263-264. 


124    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  United  States  Commissioner  came  one  day  to 
Paris  to  purchase  New  Orleans,  and  he  went  back  to 
America  with  a  deed  to  more  than  800,000  square 
miles  of  the  region  which  La  Salle  had  claimed  for 
Louis  XIV  by  virtue  of  the  commission  which  he  carried 
in  his  bosom  from  the  Rue  de  la  Truanderie  more  than 
a  century  before: 

"The  First  Consul  of  the  French  Republic,  desiring 
to  give  to  the  United  States  a  strong  proof  of  friend- 
ship, doth  hereby  cede  to  the  said  United  States,  in  the 
name  of  the  French  Republic,  forever  and  in  full  sov- 
ereignty, the  said  territory,  with  all  its  rights  and 
appurtenances,  as  fully  and  in  the  same  manner  as 
they  might  have  been  acquired  by  the  French  Re- 
public."1 

The  dream  faded  into  something  undefined  but 
greater,  relieving  Napoleon  and  France  of  immediate 
dangers  and  promising  more  to  humanity,  we  must 
agree,  than  a  colony  administered  at  that  distance 
and  separated  from  a  young,  growing  nation  merely 
by  a  shifting  river  that  must  inevitably  have  made 
trouble  instead  of  preventing  it. 

Whatever  may  be  said  of  Napoleon's  motives  or 
compulsions  in  this  matter  or  of  his  service  to  mankind 
in  others,  he  has  been  "useful  to  the  universe,"  not  in 
preventing  England  from  ruling  in  that  valley  and  so 
dominating  America,  but  in  making  it  possible  for  the 
United  States  to  undertake  the  greatest  task  ever 
given  into  the  hands  of  a  republic,  and  at  the  same 
time  enabling  it  to  keep  the  good-will  of  that  people 
who  might  (if  the  other  dream  had  been  realized)  have 

1  Treaty  of  Purchase  between  the  United  States  and  the  French  Republic, 
Art.  I. 


THE   PASSING  OF  NEW  FRANCE  125 

become  the  worst  of  her  enemies.  It  was  Napoleon, 
whatever  his  motive,  Napoleon  in  the  name  of  the 
French  people,  who  gave  the  United  States  the  possi- 
bility of  becoming  a  world-power. 


CHAPTER  VII 
THE   PEOPLING   OF  THE  WILDERNESS 

LET  us  remind  ourselves  again,  before  the  hordes  of 
.   frontiersmen  and  settlers  come  over  the  moun- 
tains  and   up  the  lakes   and   down  the  rivers, 
erasing  most  of  the  tangible  memories  of  the  inter- 
montane,  primeval   western   wilderness,  that   France 
evoked  it  from  the  unknown. 

A  circle  drawn  round  the  Louvre  with  the  radius  of 
two  kilometres,  enclosed  the  little  patch  of  earth  from 
which  were  evoked  these  millions  of  acres  of  untouched 
forests  and  millions  of  acres  of  virgin  plain  and  prairie, 
seamed  and  watered  by  a  hundred  thousand  streams, 
washed  by  a  chain  of  the  mightiest  inland  fresh-water 
oceans,  and  guarded  by  two  ranges  of  mountains. 
Within  that  narrow  circle,  four  kilometres  in  diameter, 
stood  Cartier  dreaming  of  Asia,  asking  for  permission 
to  explore  the  mysterious  square  gulf,  the  St.  Law- 
rence, and  again  presenting  to  the  king  the  dusky 
captive  Donnacona;  within  that  circle  was  the  street, 
Rue  aux  Ours,  whose  meat  shops  Lescarbot  in  Acadia 
remembered  as  the  place  of  good  food  and  doubtless 
of  excited  talk  concerning  the  unexplored  New  France, 
whose  hardships  and  pleasures  he  afterward  tasted; 
within  that  circle  Champlain  walked,  as  in  a  dream, 
we  are  told,  impatient  as  a  lion  in  a  cage,  longing  to  be 
again  upon  the  wilderness  path,  westward  of  Quebec, 

126 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    127 

toward  the  unknown;  within  that  circle  the  priest 
Olier,  of  St.  Germain-des-Pres,  had  his  vision  that  led 
to  the  founding  of  Montreal,  whose  consecration  was 
celebrated  also  within  that  same  circumference  at  the 
Cathedral  of  Notre  Dame;  within  that  circle  La  Salle 
lodged  in  Rue  de  la  Truanderie,  awaiting  his  fateful 
commission  that  should  give  him  leave  to  make  real 
his  dream  of  a  wilderness  empire;  not  a  stone's  throw 
away  from  the  Rue  de  la  Truanderie  ran  the  street 
having  its  beginning  or  end  in  Rue  aux  Ours,  Rue  Quin- 
campoix,  in  which  the  thousands  jostled  and  fought 
from  morning  till  night  for  the  purchase  of  stock  in 
that  same  wilderness  empire;  and  it  was  finally  within 
that  same  circle  that  the  wilderness  dream,  seen  for  a 
moment  again  by  Napoleon,  grew  into  the  vision  of  a 
republic — a  republic  that  might  be  found,  as  Napoleon 
said,  "too  powerful  for  Europe  in  two  or  three  cen- 
turies," but  in  whose  bosom  dissensions,  as  he  pro- 
phesied, could  be  looked  for  in  the  future.  A  wilder- 
ness, with  a  radius  of  nearly  a  thousand  kilometres, 
was  evoked  from  the  envisioning,  praying,  adventur- 
ing, and  enduring  of  a  few  Frenchmen,  led  by  fewer 
Frenchmen,  who  stood  sooner  or  later  all  within  the 
narrow  circle  that  sweeps  around  the  Sorbonne,  but 
four  kilometres  in  diameter. 

I  walked,  in  the  afternoon  of  the  last  day  of  the 
old  year  1910,  entirely  around  the  old  city  of  Paris 
by  way  of  its  fortifications,  in  a  circle  three  kilometres 
longer  of  radius,  within  a  few  hours  encompassing  a 
ground,  rich  in  what  it  yields  to-day  in  fruits  of  art, 
literature,  and  science — of  indefatigable,  intellectual 
industry  and  imagination — but  richer  than  its  inhabi- 
tants know  in  what  has  grown  upon  the  billion  acres 


128     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

which  it  has  lifted  out  of  the  ocean,1  and  given  as  a 
soil  where  civilization  could  gather  its  forces  from  all 
peoples  and  begin  afresh  on  the  problems  of  the  in- 
dividual and  society. 

It  is  a  new  view  of  Paris,  I  know.  No  historian  of 
the  United  States  has,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  presented 
it.  Yet  I  think  it  is  not  a  distorted  vision  which  en- 
abled me,  looking  in  from  the  old  fortifications,  to  see 
Paris  not  merely  as  the  capital  of  art  and  of  a  great 
modern  language  and  literature,  as  those  who  live 
there  see  her,  nor  as  the  centre  of  gayety  and  frivolity, 
as  so  many  of  my  own  countrymen  see  her,  but  as  the 
parent  of  fruitful  wildernesses,  as  a  patron  of  pioneers, 
as  the  divinity  of  the  verges,  as  the  godmother  of  a 
frontier  democracy. 

It  is  to  be  remembered,  too,  let  me  say  again,  that, 
while  England  held  control  of  one  half  of  the  Missis- 
sippi Valley  for  twenty  years  after  1763,  and  Spain  of 
the  other  half  for  twenty  more,  the  occupation  was 
hardly  more  than  nominal.  Indeed,  the  English  king, 
George  III,  in  1763  forbade  colonization — as  Louis 
XIV  at  one  time  had  wished  to  prevent  it — beyond  the 
Alleghany  Mountains  without  his  special  permission, 
and,  moreover,  it  was  hardly  more  than  ten  years  after 
the  titular  transfer  to  England  that  the  colonists  de- 
clared themselves  independent.  As  for  the  Spanish 
sovereign,  delaying  five  years  in  sending  a  representa- 
tive to  take  over  the  government  of  his  unprofitable 
half  of  the  wilderness,  he  had  no  need  to  make  a  decree 
forbidding  settlement.     There  were  no  eager  settlers. 

What  virtually  happened,   therefore,  was  that  the 

1  For  it  will  be  remembered  that  to  geographers  before  Cartier  this  Mis- 
sissippi Valley  was  but  a  sea,  even  as  ages  before  it  actually  was. 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    129 

pioneers  of  France  gave  the  valley  not  to  England,  not 
to  Spain,  not  even  to  the  American-English  colonists, 
but  to  the  pioneers  of  the  young  republic,  who,  whatever 
their  origin,  were  without  European  nationality. 

It  may  be  said  with  approximate  accuracy  that,  while 
the  British  flag  supplanted  the  French  for  a  little  on  a 
few  scattered  forts  on  the  east  side  of  the  Mississippi 
and  the  Spanish  flag  floated  for  a  little  while  on  the 
other  side  of  the  river,  the  heart  of  America  really 
knew  in  turn,  first,  only  the  old  Americans,  the  In- 
dians; second,  the  French  pioneers;  and  third,  the  new 
Americans. 

The  valley  heard,  as  I  have  said,  hardly  a  sound  of 
the  Seven  Years'  War,  the  "Old  French  War"  as  Park- 
man  called  it.  Only  on  its  border  was  there  the  slight- 
est bloodshed.  All  it  knew  was  that  the  fleur-de-lis 
flags  no  longer  waved  along  its  rivers  and  that  after  a 
few  years  men  came  with  axes  and  ploughs  through  the 
passes  in  the  mountains  carrying  an  emblem  that  had 
never  grown  in  European  fields — a  new  flag  among 
national  banners.  They  were  bearing,  to  be  sure,  a 
constitution  and  institutions  strange  to  France,  but 
only  less  strange  to  England,  and  perhaps  no  less 
strange  to  other  nations  of  Europe. 

I  emphasize  this  because  our  great  debt  to  English 
antecedents  has  obscured  the  fact  that  the  great  phys- 
ical heritage  between  the  mountains,  consecrated  of 
Gallic  spirit,  came,  in  effect,  directly  from  the  hands 
that  won  its  first  title,  the  French,  into  the  hands  of 
American  settlers,  at  the  moment  when  a  "separate 
and  individual  people"  were  "springing  into  national 
life." 

This  territory  was  distinct  from  that  of  the  British 


130    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

colonies  up  to  the  very  time  of  the  American  Revolu- 
tion. And  when  the  Revolution  was  over  and  inde- 
pendence was  won,  by  the  aid  of  France  let  it  be  re- 
membered, the  only  settlements  within  the  valley 
were  three  little  clusters  of  French  gathered  about  the 
forts  once  French,  then  for  a  few  years  nominally 
English,  and  then  American:  two  thousand  inhabitants 
at  Detroit  and  four  thousand  at  Vincennes,  on  the 
Wabash,  and  in  the  hamlets  along  the  Mississippi  above 
the  Ohio. 

How  little  the  life  of  those  settlements  was  dis- 
turbed is  intimated  by  what  occurred  in  one  of  the 
Illinois  villages — that  about  Fort  Chartres.  The  ven- 
erable and  beloved  commander,  Louis  St.  Ange  de 
Belle  Rive,  had  upon  the  first  formal  surrender  as- 
cended the  Mississippi  River  and  crossed  to  the  Span- 
ish territory,  where  the  foundations  of  the  city  of  St. 
Louis  were  being  laid,  but  the  British  officer  in  com- 
mand at  Fort  Chartres  dying  suddenly,  and  there  being 
no  one  competent  to  succeed  him,  St.  Ange  returned 
to  his  old  post,  restored  order,  and  remained  there 
until  another  British  officer  could  reach  the  fort.  The 
habitants  were  accustomed  "to  obey,  without  ques- 
tion, the  orders  of  their  superiors.  .  .  .  (They)  yielded 
a  passive  obedience  to  the  new  rulers.  .  .  .  They  re- 
mained the  owners,  the  tillers  of  the  soil."1  And  one 
of  the  last  acts  of  the  Continental  Congress  and  the 
first  of  the  new  Congress,  under  the  Constitution,  was 
to  provide  for  an  enumeration  of  these  French  settlers 
and  for  the  allotment  to  them  of  lands  in  this  valley 
where  they  had  been  the  sole  owners. 

Many  of  the  French  habitants  were  not  of  pure 

1  Roosevelt,  "Winning  of  the  West,"  I  :  38,  Alleghany  edition. 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    131 

blood.  The  French  seldom  took  women  with  them 
into  the  wilderness.  They  were  traders,  trappers,  and 
soldiers.  They  married  Indian  wives,  untrammelled, 
as  President  Roosevelt  says,  "by  the  queer  pride 
which  makes  a  man  of  English  stock  unwilling  to  make 
a  red-skinned  woman  his  wife,  though  anxious  enough 
to  make  her  his  concubine."1 

They  were  under  ordinary  circumstances  good- 
humored,  kindly  men,  "always  polite"2 — in  "agreeable 
contrast"  to  most  frontiersmen — religious,  yet  fond  of 
merrymaking,  of  music  and  dancing;  and  while,  as 
time  went  on,  they  came  to  borrow  traits  of  their  red 
neighbors  and  even  to  forget  the  years  and  months 
(reckoning  time,  as  the  Indians  did,  from  the  flood  of 
the  river  or  the  ripening  of  strawberries),  still  they 
kept  many  valuable  and  amiable  qualities,  to  be  merged 
eventually  in  the  new  life  that  soon  swept  over  their 
beautiful  little  villages.  Of  the  coming  of  a  strange, 
new,  strenuous  life,  a  stray  English  or  American  fur 
trader  gave  them  occasional  presentment,  as  it  were, 
the  spray  of  the  swelling,  restless  sea  of  human  spirits, 
beating  against  the  mountain  barriers  and  flung  far 
inland. 

In  the  early  part  of  the  eighteenth  century  an 
English  governor  of  the  colony  of  Virginia,  Alexander 
Spotswood,  had  led  a  band  of  horsemen  known  after- 
ward as  his  "Knights  of  the  Golden  Horseshoe,"  with 
great  hilarity,  "stimulated  by  abundance  of  wine, 
champagne,  rum,"  and  other  liquors,  over  the  Blue 
Ridge  Mountains,  a  part  of  the  Alleghany  Range,  to 
the  Shenandoah.     He  had  talked  menacingly  of  the 

1  Roosevelt,  "Winning  of  the  West,"  I  :  41. 

2  "Winning  of  the  West,"  I  :  45. 


132     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

French  who  held  the  valley  beyond,  had  encouraged 
the  extension  of  English  settlements  to  break  the  line 
of  French  possessions,  and  had  formed  a  short-lived 
Virginia-Indian  company  to  protect  the  frontier  against 
French  and  Indian  incursions.  This  expedition  was  a 
visible  challenge.  With  his  merry  company  he  buried 
a  record  of  his  "farthest  west"  journey  in  one  of  the 
bottles  emptied  en  route  and  then  went  back  to  tide- 
water. That  was  the  end  of  his  adventure;  little  or 
nothing  came  of  his  "flourish"  except  the  extension  of 
the  Virginia  frontier  to  the  Blue  Ridge  Mountains. 

Only  traders  and  trappers  ventured  farther  or  even 
so  far  during  the  next  three  or  four  decades,  and  they 
were  a  "set  of  abandoned  wretches,"  or  so  a  later 
governor  characterized  them,  though  Parkman  men- 
tions some  exceptions,  and  I  wish  to  believe  there 
were  more,  since  one  of  them,  I  find,  carried  my  own 
name  far  into  that  country  on  his  trading  and  hunting 
expeditions  among  and  with  the  Indians. 

Searching,  a  few  years  ago,  the  files  of  a  paper  pub- 
lished early  in  the  nineteenth  century  on  the  edge  of 
this  wilderness,  which  was  already  calling  itself  the 
Western  World — a  paper,  one  of  the  first  of  the  myriad 
white  leaves  into  which  the  falling  forests  have  been 
converted  and  scattered  thick  enough  to  cover  every 
square  foot  of  the  valley — I  happened  upon  this  rec- 
ord, surprised  as  if  a  bit  of  the  transmontane  sea 
spray  had  touched  my  own  face  on  the  Mississippi: 
"That  delightful  country"  (Kentucky),  it  ran,  "from 
time  immemorial  had  been  the  resort  of  wild  beasts  and 
of  men  only  less  savage,  when  in  the  year  1767  it  was 
visited  by  John  Finley  and  a  few  wandering  white  men 
from  the  British  colony  of  North  Carolina,  allured  by 


THE   PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    133 

the  love  of  hunting  and  the  desire  of  barter  with  the 
Indians.  The  distance  of  this  country  from  populous 
parts  of  the  colonies,  almost  continuous  wars,  and  the 
claims  of  the  French  had  prevented  all  attempts  at  ex- 
ploration." 

I  seize  upon  this  partly  because,  having  succeeded 
to  the  name  of  this  hunter  and  trader,  who  entered  the 
valley  just  as  St.  Ange  was  yielding  Fort  Chartres  to 
the  English  and  crossing  the  Mississippi,  I  am  able  to 
show  that  my  own  ancestral  sympathies  while  dwelling 
on  the  frontiers  were  not  with  the  French.  But  I 
quote  it  chiefly  because  he  was  a  typical  forerunner, 
a  first  frontiersman. 

Like  the  coureur  de  bois  Nicolas  Perrot,  of  exactly 
a  century  before,  he  was  only  the  dawn  of  the  light — 
the  light  of  another  day,  which  was  beginning  to  appear 
in  the  valley.  For  it  was  he  who  led  Daniel  Boone  to 
the  first  exploring  and  settling  of  that  wilderness  south 
of  the  Ohio,  which,  to  quote  further  from  the  paper 
called  the  Western  Worlds  had  a  soil  "more  fat  and 
fertile  than  Egypt" — and  was  the  place  where  "Pan, 
if  he  ever  existed,  held  dominion  unmolested  of  Ceres 
or  Lucinia." 

Such  was  the  almost  soundless  beginning  of  what 
soon  developed  into  a  mighty  "processional,"  its  rum- 
blings of  wagons  and  shoutings  of  drivers  on  land  and 
blowing  of  conches  on  the  rivers  increasing,  accom- 
panied by  the  sound  of  rushing  waters,  the  cry  of 
frightened  birds,  and  the  thunders  of  crashing  trees. 
First  came  this  silent  hunter  and  fur  trader,  almost 
as  stealthy  as  the  Indian  in  his  movements;  then  the 

1  Western  World,  published  at  Frankfort,  Ky.,  1806-8,  by  John  Wood  and 
Joseph  M.  Street. 


134    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

pale,  gaunt,  slow-moving,  half  hunter,  half  farmer, 
too  indolent  to  disturb  the  wilderness  from  which  he 
got  a  meagre  living,  planting  his  meagre  crops  among 
the  girdled  trees  of  withered  foliage,  which  he  did  not 
take  the  trouble  to  cut  down;  then  the  backwoodsman, 
sallow  as  his  immediate  predecessor  from  the  shade  of 
the  forest,  who  with  his  axe  made  a  little  clearing, 
built  a  "shack,"  turned  his  cattle  into  the  grass  that 
had  grown  for  centuries  untouched,  and  let  his  pigs 
feed  on  the  acorns;  then  the  more  robust  agriculturist 
who  aggressively  pushed  back  the  shadows  of  the 
forest,  planted  the  wilderness  with  seeds  of  a  magic 
learned  in  the  valleys  of  Europe  and  Asia,  put  up  the 
fences  of  individualistic  struggle,  and  built  his  log 
cabin,  the  wilderness  castle,  the  birthplace  of  the  new 
American;  then  the  speculator  and  promoter  (the 
hunter  and  explorer  of  the  urban  occupation);  and 
finally  in  their  wake  the  builders  of  mills  and  factories 
and  cities — drab,  smoky,  vainglorious,  ill-smelling, 
bad-architectured  centres  of  economic  activity,  fringed 
with  unoccupied,  unimproved,  naked  areas,  plotted 
and  held  for  increment,  earned  only  by  risk  and  pri- 
vation. 

This  processional,  "this  gradual  and  continuous 
progress  of  the  European  race  toward  the  Rocky 
Mountains,"  says  the  vivid  pen  of  De  Tocqueville, 
"has  the  solemnity  of  a  providential  event.  It  is  like 
a  deluge  of  men,  rising  unabatedly  and  driven  daily 
onward  by  the  hand  of  God."1 

The  story  of  this  anabasis  has  been  told  in  hundreds 
and  thousands  of  fragments — the  anabasis  that  has 
had  no  katabasis — the  literal  going  up  of  a  people,  as 

1  "Democracy  in  America,"  ed.  Gilman,  I  :  512. 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    135 

we  shall  see,  from  primitive  husbandry  and  handicraft 
and  a  neighborly  individualism,  to  another  level,  of 
machine  labor,  of  more  comfortable  living,  and  of 
socialized  aspiration. 

De  Quincey  has  gathered  into  an  immortal  story  the 
dramatic  details  of  an  exodus  that  had  its  beginning 
and  end  just  at  the  time  when  these  half  huntsmen, 
half  traders  were  creeping  down  from  the  farther 
ridges  of  the  Alleghanies  into  the  wilderness,  where  the 
little  French  settlements  were  clinging  like  clusters  of 
ripened  grapes  to  a  great  vine — the  story  of  the  flight 
of  the  Kalmuck  Tartars  from  the  banks  of  the  Volga, 
across  the  steppes  of  Europe  and  the  deserts  of  Asia 
to  the  frontiers  of  China — the  story  of  the  journey  of 
over  a  half  million  semi-barbarians,  half  of  whom  per- 
ished by  the  way  from  cold  or  heat,  from  starvation  or 
thirst,  or  from  the  sabres  and  cannon  of  the  savage 
hosts  pursuing  them  by  day  and  night  through  the 
endless  stretches — the  story  of  the  translation  of  these 
nomad  herdsmen  on  the  steppes  of  Russia  through  "in- 
finite misery"  into  stable  agriculturists  beneath  the 
great  wall  of  China. 

If  the  myriad  details  of  this  new-world  migration 
could  be  summarized  with  like  genius,  we  should  have 
a  drama  to  put  beside  the  exodus  of  Israel  from  Egypt 
and  their  conquest  of  Canaan — a  drama,  less  pictur- 
esque and  highly  colored  than  that  of  the  flight  of  the 
Tartars — their  Oriental  costumes,  their  fierce  horses, 
their  camels  and  tents,  showing,  unhidden  of  tree 
against  the  snowy  or  sandy  desert — but  infinitely  more 
consequential  in  the  history  of  the  human  race. 

The  Indians,  hostile  to  this  horde  that  built  cabins 
upon  their  hunting-grounds  and  devoured  their  forests, 


136    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

were  to  the  wilderness  migrants,  driven,  not  of  the 
hand  of  man  but,  as  De  Tocqueville  says,  "of  the  hand 
of  God"  made  manifest  in  some  human  instinct,  some 
desire  of  freedom,  some  hatred  of  convention,  some 
hope  of  power  or  possession,  what  the  Kirghese  and 
Bashkirs  and  Russians  were  to  those  Asiatic  migrants, 
pursuing  them  day  and  night  like  fiends  for  thousands 
of  miles.  And  the  myriad  sufferings  of  the  American 
migrants  from  hunger  and  thirst,  from  the  freezing 
cold  and  the  blasting,  blistering,  wilting  heat,  from 
the  fevers  of  the  new-broken  lands,  from  the  ravages 
of  locust  and  grasshopper,  and  chinch-bug  and  drought, 
from  isolation  from  human  friendships,  from  want  of 
gentle  nursing — even  De  Quincey's  improvident  trav- 
ellers did  not  endure  more,  nor  the  children  of  Israel, 
to  whose  thirst  the  smitten  rock  yielded  water,  to  whose 
hunger  the  heavens  ministered  with  manna  and  the 
earth  with  quail,  whose  pursuing  enemies  were  drowned 
in  the  sea  that  closed  over  their  pathway,  and  whose 
confronting  enemies  in  the  land  they  entered  to  possess 
were  overcome  by  the  aid  of  unseen  armies  that  were 
heard  marching  in  the  tops  of  the  mulberry-trees,  or 
were  seen  by  friendly  vision  assembling  their  chariots 
in  the  skies  above. 

Here  across  the  Mississippi  Valley  is  an  exodus  ac- 
complished not  of  a  single  night,  as  these  two  of  which 
I  have  just  spoken,  but  extended  through  a  hundred 
years  of  home  leavings  and  love  privations.  Here  is 
an  anabasis  of  a  century  of  privations,  titanic  labors, 
frontier  battles,  endured  countless  times,  till  these 
migrants  of  Europe  and  of  the  new-world  seaboard, 
became,  as  children  of  the  wilderness,  a  new  people, 
with   qualities   so   distinctive   as   to   lead   the   highest 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    137 

authority1  on  the  history  of  that  valley  to  characterize 
the  west  not  as  a  geographic  division  of  the  United 
States,  but  as  a  "form  of  society"  with  its  own  peculiar 
flowering,  developed,  not  as  Parkman's  magnificent 
fleur-de-lis,2  by  cross-fertilization,  nor  by  grafting,  but 
simply  by  the  planting  or  sowing  of  Old  World  seeds 
on  new  and  free  land,  where  the  mountains  kept  off 
the  pollen  of  alien  spirit,  where  the  puritanical  winds 
of  the  New  England  coast  were  somewhat  tempered 
by  the  warmer  winds  from  the  south,  where  the  waters 
had  some  iron  in  them,  but,  most  of  all,  where  the  soil 
was  practically  as  free  as  when  it  came  from  the  hands 
of  the  glaciers  and  the  streams. 

It  is  this  distinctiveness  of  development,  due  to  the 
mountains'  challenge  to  every  man's  spirit  as  he  passed, 
to  the  isolation  which  compelled  him  to  work  out  his 
own  salvation,  and  to  the  constant  struggle,  largely 
single-handed,  with  frontier  forces — as  well  as  the 
uniqueness  of  background — that  gave  the  west  a  char- 
acter which  identifies  it  to  discerning  minds  quite  as 
much  as  its  geographic  boundaries.  It  is  this  fact 
which  makes  the  French  pioneering  preface  to  a  civili- 
zation different  from  anything  that  has  developed  else- 
where in  the  United  States,  and  not  only  different  in 
the  past  but  now  the  dominant  force  in  American 
education,  politics,  and  industry. 

What  that  civilization  would  have  been  without  the 
adventurous  French  preface  we  can  but  vainly  surmise. 
What  it  is  with  that  background,  that  preface,  is  in- 
deed the  "foremost  chapter  in  the  files  of  time."     As 

1  Frederick  J.  Turner,  "The  Significance  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  in 
American  History,"  in  Proceedings  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  Historical  As- 
sociation (1909-10),  3  :  159-184. 

2  See  Epilogue. 


138     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Ambassador  James  Bryce  has  said:  "What  Europe  is 
to  Asia,  what  England  is  to  the  rest  of  Europe,  what 
America  is  to  England,  that  the  western  States  are 
to  the  Atlantic  States."1  The  French  may  dispute 
the  implied  claim  of  the  second  of  these  comparisons, 
but  even  they  will  have  a  satisfaction  in  admitting  that 
their  particular  part  of  the  United  States  is  to  the  rest, 
which  was  not  touched  by  their  priests  and  explorers, 
what  "Europe  is  to  Asia."  And  here  is  my  particular 
justification  for  asking  the  imaginations  of  the  people 
of  France  to  occupy  and  hold  that  to  which  the  pref- 
ace has  given  them  the  best  of  titles. 

Meanwhile,  that  migration,  heralded,  as  we  have 
seen,  just  before  the  Revolution,  by  huntsmen  and 
traders,  meagre  by  reason  of  Indian  hostility  and  the 
need  of  soldiers  on  the  Atlantic  side  of  the  mountains 
till  independence  had  been  won,  became  appreciable 
at  the  end  of  the  century  and  grew  to  an  inundating 
stream  after  the  War  of  1812  had  made  the  Mississippi 
secure  to  the  new  republic  beyond  all  question. 

"Old  America,"  said  an  observing  English  traveller 
in  1 817,  "seems  to  be  breaking  up  and  moving  west- 
ward. We  are  seldom  out  of  sight,  as  we  travel  on  this 
grand  track  (the  national  turnpike  through  Pennsyl- 
vania) towards  the  Ohio,  of  family  groups  behind  and 
before  us.  ...  A  small  waggon  so  light  that  you 
might  almost  carry  it,  yet  strong  enough  to  bear  a 
good  load  of  bedding  and  utensils  and  provisions  and 
a  swarm  of  young  citizens,  and  to  sustain  marvellous 
shocks  in  its  passage  over  these  rocky  heights  with 
two  small  horses  and  sometimes  a  cow  or  two,  comprises 
their  all;  excepting  a  little  store  of  hard  earned  cash 

1  "American  Commonwealth,"  191 3  ed.,  2  :  892. 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    139 

for  the  land-office  of  the  district;  where  they  may  ob- 
tain a  title  for  as  many  acres  as  they  possess  half 
dollars,  being  one-fourth  of  the  purchase  money.  The 
waggon  has  a  tilt,  or  cover,  made  of  a  sheet,  or  perhaps 
a  blanket.  The  family  are  seen  before,  behind,  or 
within  the  vehicle,  according  to  the  road  or  the  weather, 
or  perhaps  the  spirits  of  the  party.  ...  A  cart  and 
single  horse,  frequently  affords  the  means  of  transfer, 
sometimes  a  horse  and  pack  saddle.  Often  the  back 
of  the  poor  pilgrim  bears  all  his  effects,  and  his  wife 
follows,  bare  footed,  bending  under  the  hopes  of  the 
family."1  This  is  a  detail  of  the  exodus  through  the 
most  northern  mountain  pass. 

Farther  south  the  procession  moved  in  heavy  wagons 
drawn  by  four  or  six  horses.  "  Family  groups,  crowding 
the  roads  and  fords,  marching  toward  the  sunset,"  at 
right  angles  to  the  courses  of  the  migratory  birds,  not 
mindful  as  they  of  seasons,  "were  typical  of  the  over- 
land migration"  across  Tennessee  and  Kentucky.  The 
poorer  classes  travelled  on  foot,  as  at  the  north,  but 
drew  after  them  carts  with  all  their  household  effects.2 

Still  farther  south  "the  same  type  of  occupation  was 
to  be  seen;  the  poorer  classes  of  southern  emigrants 
cut  out  their  clearings  along  the  rivers  that  flowed  to 
the  gulf  and  to  the  lower  Mississippi,"3  and  later  still 
farther  west  into  what  is  now  Texas. 

The  squatters  whom  I  saw  in  my  walk  around  the 
city  of  Paris,  inhabiting  what  was  the  military  zone 
with  their  portable  houses,  or  in  their  dilapidated 
shacks,  had  better  shelter  than  they  who  first  invaded 

1  Morris  Birkbeck,  "Notes  on  a  Tour  in  America,  1817,"  pp.  34,  35. 

2  F.  J.  Turner,  "Rise  of  the  New  West,"  p.  80. 
J  F.  J.  Turner,  "Rise  of  the  New  West,"  p.  9a 


140     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  zone  beyond  the  mountain  walls  that  were  the 
natural  western  fortifications  of  the  Atlantic  colonies. 

But  though  many  of  those  western  wilderness  immi- 
grants were  "poor  pilgrims'*  and  for  a  time  squatters 
(as  the  immediately  extramural  population  of  Paris), 
they  were  recruited  from  the  sturdiest  stock  on  the 
Atlantic  side  of  the  fortifications.  Some  went,  to  be 
sure,  who  had  failed  in  the  old  place,  but  were  ready 
to  make  new  hazard;  some  wanted  greater  freedom 
than  the  more  highly  socialized  and  conventionalized 
life  within  the  fortifications  would  permit;  some  longed 
for  adventure;  some  sought  a  fortune  or  competency 
perhaps  impossible  in  the  old  settlements;  some  had 
only  the  inherited  promptings  of  the  nomad  savage  in 
them,  and  kept  ever  moving  on,  making  their  nameless 
graves  out  in  the  gloom  of  the  forest  or  upon  the  silent 
plains. 

It  was  indeed  a  motley  procession,  the  by-product 
of  the  more  or  less  conservative,  sometimes  politically 
or  religiously  intolerant,  aristocratic  tide-water  settle- 
ments. Yet  do  not  make  the  mistake  of  thinking 
that  it  was  slag  or  refuse  humanity,  such  as  camps  in 
the  narrow  zone  around  the  gates  of  Paris.  It  is  rather 
like  an  industrial  by-product  that  has  needed  some 
slight  change  or  adaptation  to  make  it  more  valuable 
to  society  than  the  original  product  upon  which  the 
manufacturers  had  kept  their  attention  fixed — or,  at 
any  rate,  to  make  the  margin  of  profit  in  the  whole 
industry  greater.  Out  of  once  discarded,  seemingly 
valueless  matter  have  come  our  coal-tar  products:  sac- 
charine many  times  sweeter  than  sugar,  colors  unknown 
to  the  old  dyers,  perfumes  as  fragrant  as  those  dis- 
tilled from  flowers,  medicines  potent  to  allay  fevers. 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    141 

Up  in  the  woods  of  Canada  last  summer  I  found  a 
chemist  trying  to  do  with  the  wood  waste  what  Remsen 
and  Perkin  and  others  have  done  with  coal  waste,  and 
I  cannot  resist  the  suggestion  of  my  metaphor  that 
there  in  the  forest  valleys  beyond  the  Alleghanies  the 
elements  and  conditions  were  found  to  convert  this 
Atlantic  by-product,  unpromising  outwardly,  into  the 
substance  of  a  new  and  precious  civilization. 

This  overmountain  procession  came  chiefly  up  the 
watercourses  of  the  south  and  middle  States.  Prior 
to  1830  the  mass  of  pioneer  colonists  in  most  of  the 
Mississippi  Valley  had  been  contributed  by  the  up- 
country  of  the  south.  The  dominant  strain  in  those 
earlier  comers,  as  President  Roosevelt  reminds  us, 
was  Scotch-Irish,  a  "race  doubly-twisted  in  the  mak- 
ing, flung  from  island  to  island  and  toughened  by 
exile" — a  race  of  frontiersmen  than  whom  a  "better 
never  appeared" — a  race  which  was  as  "steel  welded 
into  the  iron  of  an  axe."  They  form  the  kernel  of  the 
"distinctively  and  intensely  American  stock  who  were 
the  pioneers  of  the  axe  and  the  rifle,  succeeding  the 
French  pioneers  of  the  sword  and  the  bateaux." 

What  I  have  just  said  of  them,  these  Scotch-Irish, 
is  in  quotation,  for  as  I  have  already  intimated,  my  own 
ancestry  is  of  that  double-twisting;  and  since  the  time 
when  my  first  American  ancestor  settled  as  the  first 
permanent  minister  beyond  the  mountains,  following 
the  paths  of  the  French  priests  in  their  missions  and 
became  a  member  of  a  presbytery  extending  from  the 
mountains  to  the  setting  sun,  until  my  last  collateral 
ancestor  living  among  the  Indians  helped  survey  the 
range  lines  of  new  States  and  finally  marked  the 
boundaries  of  the  last  farms  in  the  passes  of  the  Rockies, 


142     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

that  ancestry  has  followed  the  frontier  westward  from 
where  Celoron  planted  the  emblems  of  French  posses- 
sion along  the  Ohio  to  where  Chevalier  la  Verendrye 
looked  upon  the  snowy  and  impassable  peaks  of  the 
Rockies. 

The  immigrants  to  America  of  that  stock  had,  many 
of  them,  at  once  on  reaching  the  new  land  found  the 
foot-hills  of  mountains,  chiefly  in  Pennsylvania.  Here 
they  settled,  gradually  pushing  their  way  southward 
in  the  troughs  of  the  mountain  streams  and  making 
finally  a  "broad  belt  from  north  to  south,  a  shield  of 
sinewy  men  thrust  in  between  the  people  of  the  sea- 
board and  the  red  warriors  of  the  wilderness,"  the  same 
men  who  declared  for  American  independence  in  North 
Carolina  before  any  others,  even  before  the  men  of 
Massachusetts.  With  this  stock  there  went  over  the 
mountain  men  of  other  origins,  of  course,  English, 
French  Huguenots,  Germans,  Hollanders,  Swedes;  but 
the  Scotch-Irish  were  the  core  of  the  new  life,  which  in 
"iron  surroundings"  became  strongly  homogeneous — 
"yet  different  from  the  rest  of  the  world — even  the 
world  of  America,  and  infinitely  more  the  world  of 
Europe." 

In  the  north  the  great  rivers  lay  across  the  tedious 
paths  that  ran  with  the  lines  of  latitude.  And  so  it 
was  partly  for  physiographic  reasons  that  the  first  far- 
stretching  expansions  of  the  New  England  settlements 
were  not  toward  this  great  western  wilderness  but 
northward  along  the  narrower  valleys.  It  was  not  until 
the  migration  had  filled  the  meagre  limits  and  capac- 
ities of  these  smaller  valleys  and  had  carried  school- 
houses  and  churches  and  town  halls  well  up  granite 
hillsides,  that  the  western  exodus  came,  to  leave  those 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    143 

hillside  homes  and  institutional  shelters  as  shells  found 
far  from  a  receding  sea,  empty  or  habited  by  a  new 
species  of  immigrant.1  Farms  were  abandoned  for 
the  fertile  fields  of  the  far  west,  from  which  wheat  can 
be  imported  for  less  than  the  cost  of  raising  it  on  the 
sterile  hills  and  in  the  short-summered  valleys.  New 
England  had  once  claimed  a  fraction  of  the  great  west, 
as,  indeed,  had  most  of  the  other  seaboard  colonies. 
But  these  claims  were  surrendered  to  the  general 
government,  as  we  shall  see  later,  "for  the  common 
good,"  and  so  her  migrants  had  none  other  than  that 
instinct  which  follows  lines  of  latitude  to  keep  them 
practically  within  the  zone  of  her  relinquished  claims. 
Over  into  New  York,  New  Jersey,  and  Pennsylvania 
her  children  overflowed  till  a  map  of  these  States  in 
1820,  colored  to  show  the  origin  and  character  of  their 
various  communities,  made  practically  all  of  western 
New  York,  a  part  of  New  Jersey  and  the  northern  third 
of  Pennsylvania,  an  expanded  New  England.  Mean- 
while the  hardiest  joined  the  transmontane  migration, 
and  in  the  decade  after  the  opening  of  the  Erie  Canal 
(1830-40)  the  whole  northern  edge  of  the  valley  takes 
color  of  New  England  conquest. 

So  the  first  peopling  was  a  mingling  of  the  children 
of  the  first  strugglers  with  a  raw  savage  continent; 
men  already  schooled  in  adversity,  already  acquainted 
with  some  of  the  frontier  problems — civilization's  most 
highly  individualized,  least  socialized  material,  the 
wheat  of  the  new  world's  first  winnowing. 

What  is  particularly  to  be  observed  is  that  men  of 

1  In  one  of  those  far  northern  valleys  which  I  know  best  there  was  a 
school,  before  the  exodus,  of  some  seventy  pupils,  gathered  from  the  farm- 
ers' families  of  the  neighborhood.  Now  there  are  not  a  half-dozen  pupils, 
and  they  are  carried  to  a  neighboring  district. 


144     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  north  and  the  south,  as  far  apart  as  Carolina  and 
Massachusetts,  came  together  beyond  the  mountains 
in  the  united  building  of  commonwealths;  for  over 
those  mountains  the  rivers  all  ran  toward  the  Missis- 
sippi, which  tied  the  interests  of  all  together. 

There  was  no  north-and-south  line  then.  The  men 
of  the  valley  were  all  westerners,  "men  of  the  western 
world";  not  yet  very  strong  as  nationalists,  that  is, 
as  men  of  the  United  States.  "Men  of  the  western 
waters"  they  also  called  themselves,  for  they  shunned 
the  uplands  and  kept  near  the  streams  by  which  or 
along  which  they  had  come  into  the  wilderness  and 
from  which  they  drank.  Men  of  the  axe  they  were, 
too,  in  that  first  occupancy,  never  venturing  far  from 
the  trees  that  gave  them  both  roof  and  fuel.  It  was 
later,  as  we  have  seen,  that  the  men  of  the  plough 
came  where  the  men  of  the  axe  had  cleared  the  way. 

It  is  interesting  to  notice  that  when  these  builders 
of  new  States  came  to  devise  symbols  for  their  official 
seals,  many  of  them  took  the  plough,  that  implement 
which  we  know  was  carried  in  the  first  Aryan  migra- 
tion into  the  plains  of  Europe,  but  some  of  them  put  a 
rising  sun  on  the  horizon  of  their  shields — the  sign  of 
the  consciousness  of  a  new  day. 

The  foundation,  then,  of  the  new  societies  was  laid 
in  what  might  be  called  a  concrete  of  character  and 
lineage — heterogeneous,  but  all  of  the  neo-American 
period  and  not  of  the  paleo-European.  Here  came  the 
ancestors  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  among  the  axemen  from 
the  South,  and  here  the  ancestors  of  General  Grant, 
among  the  builders  of  towns,  from  New  England,  both 
born  in  cabins.  And  these  instances  are  but  sug- 
gestive of  the  conglomerate  that  was  to  be  as  practi- 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    145 

cable  for  building  purposes  (the  co-efficient  of  spirit 
being  once  determined)  as  any  homogeneous,  age-old 
rock  used  in  the  structure  of  nations.  It  became 
"homogeneous"  not  as  bricks  or  stones  built  into  a 
wall  by  mortar  or  cement  but  as  concrete,  eternal  as 
the  hills,  needing  not  to  be  chiselled  and  split  but 
only  to  be  moulded  and  "set"  at  just  the  right  moment. 
If  this  gives  any  suggestion  of  want  of  permanence,  of 
liability  of  cracking,  then  the  figure  is  not  fortunate. 
I  mean  only  to  suggest,  by  still  another  metaphor,  that 
out  of  the  myriad  rugged  individualities,  idiosyn- 
crasies, and  independences  a  new  rock  has  been  formed. 

How  distinctly  western  this  first  migration  was  you 
may  know  from  the  fact  that  there  was  frequent  talk 
of  secession  from  the  Union  by  the  seaboard  common- 
wealths in  the  early  post-revolutionary  days.  There 
were  even,  as  we  have  seen,  hopes  and  fears  that  a 
Franco-American  republic  might  grow  out  of  that 
solidarity  and  independent  spirit  that  were  ready  to 
forsake  the  government  on  the  eastern  side  of  the 
mountains,  which  seemed  to  be  heedless  of  western 
needs.  This  tells  us,  who  are  conscious  of  the  national 
spirit  which  is  now  stronger,  perhaps,  in  that  valley 
than  in  any  other  part  of  the  Union,  how  strong  the 
western,  the  anti-nationalistic,  spirit  must  have  been 
then. 

But  that  was  before  the  coming  of  the  east-and-west 
canal  and  the  east-and-west  railroads,  which  virtually 
upheaved  a  new  watershed  and  changed  the  whole 
physiographic,  social,  and  economic  relationships  of 
the  west.  The  old  French  river  Colbert,  the  Eternal 
River,  was  virtually  cut  into  two  great  rivers,  one  of 
which  was  to  empty  into  the  gulf  (just  as  it  did  in 


146     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

La  Salle's  day  and  in  Iberville's  day),  while  the  other 
was  to  run  through  the  valley  of  the  Great  Lakes,  down 
through  the  valley  of  the  hostile  Iroquois,  into  the 
harbor  of  New  York.  This  is  not  observable  on  the 
topographical  maps  simply  because  of  our  unimagina- 
tive definition  of  a  watershed.  A  watershed  is  changed, 
according  to  that  definition,  only  by  an  actual  eleva- 
tion or  depression  of  the  surface  of  the  earth,  whereas 
a  railroad  or  canal  that  bridges  ravines  and  tunnels  or 
climbs  elevations,  or  a  freight  rate  that  diverts  traffic 
into  a  new  course,  as  suddenly  raises  or  lowers  and  as 
certainly  removes  watersheds  as  if  mountains  were  mir- 
aculously lifted  and  carried  into  the  midst  of  the  sea. 

So  there  came  to  be  not  only  two  rivers  but  two 
valleys,  the  one  of  the  lake  and  prairie  plainsmen  and 
the  other  of  the  gulf  plainsmen.  The  steam  shuttles 
flying  east  and  west  by  land  and  water  wove  a  pattern 
in  the  former  different  from  the  latter  but  on  the  same 
warp.  Two  widely  unlike  industrial  and  social  systems 
gradually  developed,  and  they,  in  turn,  struggling  for 
the  mastery  of  lands  beyond  the  Mississippi,  divided 
the  nearer  west — once  a  homogeneous  state  of  mind — 
into  two  wests  and  all  but  disrupted  the  Union. 

Then  the  direct  European  immigration  began,  mil- 
lions coming  from  single  states  of  Europe,  sifting  into 
the  neo-American  settlements,  but  for  the  most  part 
passing  on,  in  mighty  armies,  to  possess  whole  tracts 
farther  west,  along  and  beyond  the  Mississippi.  In 
some  parts  of  the  northwest  to-day  the  parents  of 
three  men  out  of  four  were  born  in  Europe — in  Scan- 
dinavia, in  Germany,  in  Russia,  in  Italy. 

So  France,  keeping  near  her  those  whom  she  loves 
best,   her  own   children,   has  yet  seen   her  Nouvelle 


THE  PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    147 

France  draw  to  it  the  children  of  all  other  nations.  As 
from  Hagar  exiled  in  the  wilderness  has  a  new  race 
sprung — has  the  wilderness  been  peopled. 

In  my  boyhood  the  last  division  of  that  great  exodus, 
largely  made  up  of  migrants  from  the  eastern  half  of 
the  valley,  was  still  passing  westward.  One  of  the 
banners  which  some  of  the  wagons  covered  with  can- 
vas ("prairie-schooners,"  as  they  were  called)  used  to 
fly  was  "Pike's  Peak  or  Bust,"  an  Americanism  in- 
dicating the  intention  of  the  pilgrims  to  reach  the 
mountain  at  the  western  terminus  of  the  great  valley 
or  die  in  the  attempt.  Occasionally  one  came  back 
with  the  inglorious  substitute  legend  upon  his  wagon, 
"Busted" — a  laconic  intimation  of  failure.  But  this 
was  the  exception.  The  west  kept,  till  it  had  made 
them  her  own,  most  of  those  who  ventured  their  all 
for  a  home  in  the  wilderness. 

There  were  "two  great  commemorative  monuments 
that  arose  to  mark  the  depth  and  permanence  of  the 
awe"  which  possessed  all  who  shared  the  calamities 
or  witnessed  the  results  of  the  Tartar  migration.  One 
was  a  "Romanang" — a  "national  commemoration, 
with  music  rich  and  solemn,"  of  all  the  souls  who  de- 
parted to  the  rest  of  Paradise  from  the  "afflictions  of 
the  desert" — and  the  "other,  more  durable  and  more 
commensurate  to  the  scale  of  the  calamity  and  to  the 
grandeur  of  the  national  exodus,"  "mighty  columns  of 
granite  and  brass,"  where  the  exodus  had  ended  in 
the  shadow  of  the  Chinese  wall.  The  inscription  on 
these  columns  reads: 

By  the  Will  of  God, 

Here,  upon  the  Brink  of  these  Deserts, 

Which  from  this  Point  begin  and  stretch  away 


148     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Pathless,  treeless,  waterless, 

For  thousands  of  miles,  and  along  the  margins  of  many 

mighty  Nations, 

Rested  from  their  labors  and  from  great  afflictions, 

Under  the  shadow  of  the  Chinese  Wall, 

And  by  the  favor  of  Kien  Long,  God's  Lieutenant  upon 

Earth, 

The  ancient  Children  of  the  Wilderness — the  Turgote 

Tartars — 

Flying  before  the  wrath  of  the  Grecian  Czar, 

Wandering  Sheep  who  had  strayed  away  from  the  Celestial 

Empire  in  the  year  1616, 

But  are  now  mercifully  gathered  again,  after  infinite  sorrow, 

Into  the  fold  of  their  forgiving  Shepherd. 

Hallowed  be  the  spot  forever, 

and 

Hallowed  be  the  day — September  8,  1771 ! 

Amen. 

There  have  been  many  expositions  of  the  fruits  of 
the  Mississippi  Valley's  agriculture  and  manufacture 
and  mining  and  thinking  and  teaching  and  preaching 
and  ministering,  but  there  has  been  no  general  com- 
memoration with  "music  rich  and  solemn"  of  those  who 
endured  the  "afflictions  of  the  wilderness,"  though  the 
last  of  the  pioneers  will  soon  have  departed  to  his  rest, 
for  fourteen  years  ago  it  was  officially  declared  that 
there  was  no  longer  a  frontier.  But  mighty  columns 
not  of  man's  rearing  stand  upon  the  farther  edge  of 
that  western  valley,  columns  of  rock  rich  with  gold 
and  silver  and  every  other  precious  metal,  surmounted, 
some  of  them  the  year  through,  with  capitals  of  snow 
and  lacking  only  the  legend: 

Here  upon  the  Brink  of  the  Plains 
Which  stretched  away  pathless,  treeless,  boundless, 


THE   PEOPLING  OF  THE  WILDERNESS    149 

Ended  their  century-long  exodus 

The  New  Children  of  the  Wilderness, 

Driven  by  the  Hand  of  God 

Westward  and  ever  Westward 

Till  they  have  at  last  entered 

Into  the  full  Heritage  of  those 

Who,  first  of  Pioneers, 

Traced  the  rivers  and  lakes  of  this  Valley 

Between  the  eternal  mountains. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN 

THE  domain  of  Louis  XIV  in  the  midst  of  America 
(between  the  Great  Lakes  and  the  gulf,  the  Al- 
leghanies  and  the  Rockies)  embraced  over  seven 
hundred  and  fifty  million  acres.  One-half  of  it,  roughly, 
was  covered  with  giant  forests  inhabited  by  fur-bearing 
animals  with  opulence  upon  their  backs.  One-half 
was  covered  with  vegetation,  varying  from  the  lux- 
uriant prairie  grass  to  the  sage-brush  of  the  shadeless 
plains,  plains  roamed  by  beasts  clothed  with  valuable 
robes.  Two-thirds  of  this  domain  was  arable,  with 
only  the  irrigation  of  the  clouds,  and  all  of  it  was 
destined  some  day  to  be  cultivated,  the  clouds  having 
the  assistance  of  man-made  irrigation  or  dry  farming. 
The  portion  east  of  the  Mississippi  (about  three 
hundred  million  acres)  was  at  one  time  estimated  to  be 
worth  not  more,  politically  and  physically,  than  the 
island  of  Guadeloupe — an  island  represented  by  a 
pin-head  on  an  ordinary  map — producing  forty  thou- 
sand tons  of  sugar  and  about  two  million  pounds  each 
of  coffee  and  cocoa. 

Even  the  people  of  the  Atlantic  States  were  accused 
by  westerners  as  late  as  1786  of  threatening  secession 
and  of  being  as  ignorant  of  the  trans-Alleghany  coun- 
try as  Great  Britain  had  been  of  America,  and  as  in- 
considerate.   The  western  half,  urged  by  the  minister 

150 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      151 

of  Louis  XV  upon  Spain  after  sixty  or  seventy  millions 
of  francs  had  been  spent  fruitlessly  upon  it  by  France, 
recovered  by  Napoleon  and  sold  to  the  United  States 
for  one-fourth  of  the  amount  that  was  expended  a 
century  later  for  the  celebration  of  the  purchase,  was 
regarded  at  the  time  of  the  purchase,  even  by  many 
seacoast  Americans,  as  useless,  except  as  it  secured 
control  of  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi.  An  important 
New  York  paper  said  editorially: 

"...  As  to  the  unbounded  region  west  of  the 
Mississippi,  it  is,  with  the  exception  of  a  very  few  set- 
tlements of  Spaniards  and  Frenchmen  bordering  on 
the  banks  of  the  river,  a  wilderness  through  which 
wander  numerous  tribes  of  Indians.  And  when  we 
consider  the  present  extent  of  the  United  States,  and 
that  not  one-sixteenth  part  of  its  territory  is  yet  under 
occupation,  the  advantage  of  the  acquisition,  as  it  re- 
lates to  actual  settlement,  appears  too  distant  and 
remote  to  strike  the  mind  of  a  sober  politician  with 
much  force.  This,  therefore,  can  only  rest  in  specu- 
lation for  many  years,  if  not  centuries  to  come,  and 
consequently  will  not  perhaps  be  allowed  very  great 
weight  in  the  account  by  the  majority  of  readers. 
But  it  may  be  added,  that  should  our  own  citizens, 
more  enterprizing  than  wise,  become  desirous  of  set- 
tling this  country,  and  emigrate  thither,  it  must  not 
only  be  attended  with  all  the  injuries  of  a  too  widely 
dispersed  population,  but,  by  adding  to  the  great 
weight  of  the  western  part  of  our  territory,  must 
hasten  the  dismemberment  of  a  large  portion  of  our 
country,  or  a  dissolution  of  the  government.  On  the 
whole,  we  think  it  may  with  candor  be  said,  that 
whether  the  possession  at  this  time  of  any  territory 


152     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

west  of  the  river  Mississippi  will  be  advantageous,  is 
at  best  extremely  problematical.  For  ourselves,  we 
are  very  much  inclined  to  the  opinion  that,  after  all, 
it  is  the  Island  of  N.  Orleans  by  which  the  command 
of  a  free  navigation  of  the  Mississippi  is  secured,  that 
gives  to  this  interesting  cession  its  greatest  value, 
and  will  render  it  in  every  view  of  immense  benefit  to 
our  country.  By  this  cession  we  hereafter  shall  hold 
within  our  own  grasp,  what  we  have  heretofore  enjoyed 
only  by  the  uncertain  tenure  of  a  treaty,  which  might 
be  broken  at  the  pleasure  of  another,  and  (governed  as 
we  now  are)  with  perfect  impunity.  Provided  there- 
fore we  have  not  purchased  it  too  dear,  there  is  all  the 
reason  for  exultation  which  the  friends  of  the  adminis- 
tration display,  and  which  all  Americans  may  be  al- 
lowed to  feel."1 

I  quote  this  to  show  how  far  from  appreciating 
France's  generosity  the  easterners,  and  especially  the 
anti-Jeffersonian  Federalists  in  America,  were  at  that 
time.  Other  and  less  conscientious  newspapers  put 
the  prodigality  of  Jefferson's  commissioners  more 
graphically: 

"Fifteen  millions  of  dollars!  they  would  exclaim. 
The  sale  of  a  wilderness  has  not  usually  commanded  a 
price  so  high.  Ferdinand  Gorges  received  but  twelve 
hundred  and  fifty  pounds  sterling  for  the  Province  of 
Maine.  William  Penn  gave  for  the  wilderness  that 
now  bears  his  name  but  a  trifle  over  five  thousand 
pounds.  Fifteen  millions  of  dollars !  A  breath  will 
suffice  to  pronounce  the  words.  A  few  strokes  of  the 
pen  will  express  the  sum  on  paper.  But  not  one 
man  in  a  thousand  has  any  conception  of  the  magni- 

1  New  York  Herald,  July  6,  1803. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      153 

tude  of  the  amount.  Weigh  it  and  there  will  be  four 
hundred  and  thirty-three  tons  of  solid  silver.  Load 
it  into  wagons,  and  there  will  be  eight  hundred  and 
sixty-six  of  them.  Place  the  wagons  in  a  line,  giving  two 
rods  to  each,  and  they  will  cover  a  distance  of  five 
and  one-third  miles.  Hire  a  laborer  to  shovel  it  into 
the  carts,  and,  though  he  load  sixteen  each  day,  he 
will  not  finish  the  work  in  two  months.  Stack  it  up 
dollar  on  dollar,  and  supposing  nine  to  make  an  inch, 
the  pile  will  be  more  than  three  miles  high.  It  would 
load  twenty-five  sloops;  it  would  pay  an  army  of  twenty- 
five  thousand  men  forty  shillings  a  week  each  for 
twenty-five  years;  it  would,  divided  among  the  popu- 
lation of  the  country,  give  three  dollars  for  each  man, 
woman,  and  child.  .  .  .  Invest  the  principal  as  school 
fund,  and  the  interest  will  support,  forever,  eighteen 
hundred  free  schools,  all  owning  fifty  scholars,  and  five 
hundred  dollars  to  each  school."1 

Napoleon  had,  indeed,  made  a  good  bargain  for 
France,  selling  a  wilderness,  which  at  best  he  could 
not  well  have  kept  long,  for  a  price  which  all  the  specie 
currency  in  the  poor  young  republic  would  not  be  ade- 
quate to  meet. 

It  was  of  this  domain  (a  part  of  the  claim  of  La  Salle 
for  Louis  XIV  in  1682,  divided  between  England  and 
Spain  in  1763,  made  one  again  in  1803  by  the  will  of 
Napoleon,  under  the  control  of  the  United  States, 
added  to  by  the  purchase  of  Florida  from  Spain  and 
the  acquisition  of  Texas,  filling  all  the  Great  Valley) — 
it  was  of  this  valley  that,  as  late  as  the  early  fifties,  a 
member  of  Congress  (afterward  to  become  vice-presi- 
dent of  the  United  States,  then  President),  Andrew 
Johnson,   although   an   earnest   advocate   of  a   liberal 

1McMaster,  "History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States,"  2  :  630. 


154    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

land  policy,  predicted  that  it  would  take  "seven  hun- 
dred years  to  dispose  of  the  public  lands  at  the  rate 
we  have  been  disposing  of  them."1  Seven  hundred 
years — as  long  as  from  the  founding  of  Charlemagne's 
new  empire  of  the  west  to  the  discovery  of  the  coasts 
of  a  still  newer  empire  of  the  west. 

But  in  two  hundred  years  from  the  day  that  La  Salle 
so  miserably  perished  on  the  plains  of  Texas,  in  exactly 
one  hundred  years  from  the  time  when,  under  the 
epoch-making  "Ordinance  of  the  Northwest"  (as  it 
has  been  called),  the  parcelling  of  the  land  began,  and 
in  less  than  half  a  century  from  the  year  when  An- 
drew Johnson's  seven-hundred-year  prophecy  began  to 
run,  practically  the  entire  domain  had  been  surveyed 
and  sold  or  given  by  the  nation  to  private  or  municipal 
or  corporate  possession.  It  was  the  24th  of  July,  1687, 
that  La  Salle  died;  it  was  July  27,  1787,  that  the  first 
great  sale  of  a  fragment  of  the  domain  was  made;  and 
it  was  in  1887,  approximately,  that  all  the  humanly 
available  domain  was  occupied  by  at  least  two  persons 
to  a  square  mile;  for  in  1890  it  was  officially  declared 
by  the  government  of  the  United  States  that  it  had  no 
frontier.  Not  that  the  land  was  all  sold,  but  all  that 
was  immediately  valuable. 

As  soon  as  the  War  of  Independence  was  over,  and 
even  during  the  struggle,  the  territories  of  several  of 
the  Atlantic  States  (or  colonies)  expanded  to  the  Mis- 
sissippi. There  was  a  quadrilateral,  trans-Alleghany 
Massachusetts,  as  indifferent  to  natural  boundaries  as 
a  "state  of  mind"  (which  Massachusetts  has  often 
been  defined  to  be),  respectful  only  of  imaginary  lines 
of  latitude  and  the  Mississippi  River,  the  Spanish 
border.      Little  Connecticut  multiplied  its  latitude  by 

1  Speech  on  the  Homestead  bill,  April  29,  1852. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      155 

degrees  of  longitude  till  it  reached  in  a  thin  but  rich 
slice  from  Pennsylvania  also  to  the  Mississippi.  Vir- 
ginia disputed  these  mountain-to-river  claims  of  her 
New  England  sisters,  but  held  unquestioned  still 
larger  territories  to  the  north  and  south — and  so  on 
from  the  sources  of  the  river  to  Florida,  South  Carolina 
even  claiming  a  strip  a  few  miles  wide  and  four  hundred 
long.  There  was  almost  a  duplication  of  the  Atlantic 
front  on  the  Mississippi  River.  These  statements  will 
not  interest  those  who  can  have  no  particular  acquain- 
tance with  the  personalities  of  those  several  common- 
wealths, quite  as  marked  as  are  those  of  Normandy 
and  Brittany;  but  even  without  this  knowledge  it  is 
possible  to  appreciate  the  magnanimity  and  the  wis- 
dom which  prompted  those  States,  many  with  large 
and  rich  claims,  to  surrender  all  to  the  central  govern- 
ment, the  Continental  Congress,  for  the  benefit  of  all 
the  States,  landful  and  landless  alike.1 

'LANDS  CEDED  BY  THE  STATES  TO  THE  UNITED  STATES 

Northwest  of  the  Ohio  River  square  miles 

Ohio 39,964 

Indiana 33,809 

Illinois 55,414 

Michigan 56,45 1 

Wisconsin 53,9^4 

Minnesota,  east  of  the  Mississippi  River 26,000 

265,562 
or  169,959,680  acres. 
Virginia  claimed  this  entire  region. 
New  York  claimed  an  indefinite  amount. 

Connecticut  claimed  about  25,600,000  acres  and  ceded  all  but  3,300,000. 
Massachusetts  claimed  about  34,560,000  acres. 

South  of  Kentucky 
South  Carolina  ceded  about  3,136,000  acres. 
North  Carolina  ceded  (nominally)  29,184,000  acres. 
Georgia  ceded  56,689,920  acres. 

— Payson  J.  Treat,  "The  National  Land  System,  1785-1820." 


156    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

So  it  was  that  even  before  the  National  Government 
was  organized  under  a  federal  constitution  in  1789,  the 
land  beyond  the  western  boundaries  of  the  several 
colonies,  out  as  far  as  the  Mississippi,  was  held  for  the 
good  of  all.  And  later  the  same  policy  followed  the 
expansion  to  the  Rockies  and  beyond.  Can  one 
imagine  a  greater  or  more  fateful  task  than  confronted 
this  young,  inexperienced  republic — to  have  the  dis- 
posal of  a  billion  acres  of  timber  lands,  grazing  lands, 
farm  lands,  ore  lands,  oil  lands,  coal  lands,  arid  lands, 
and  swamp  lands  for  the  good  not  only  of  the  first 
comers  and  of  those  then  living  in  the  Atlantic  States 
but  also  of  the  millions  that  should  inhabit  all  that 
country  in  future  generations  as  well — for  the  good  of 
all  of  all  time? 

This  one-time  bed  of  the  Paleozoic  sea  between 
Archaean  shores,  raised  in  time  above  the  ocean  and 
enriched  of  the  mountains  that  through  millions  of 
years  were  gradually  to  be  worn  down  by  the  natural 
forces  of  the  valley,  and  finally,  as  we  have  seen, 
opened  by  the  French  as  a  new-created  world  to  be 
peopled  by  the  old  world,  then  overflowing  its  brim, 
became  all  of  it  in  the  space  of  a  single  lifetime  the 
property  of  a  few  million  human  beings,  their  heirs,  and 
assigns  forever.  The  "men  of  always"1  had  actually 
come  and  were  to  divide  and  distribute  among  them- 
selves the  stores  of  millions  of  years  as  if  reserved  for 
them  from  the  foundation  of  the  world. 

When  Deucalion  and  Pyrrha  went  forth  to  repeople 
the  world  after  a  flood,  they  were  told  by  the  oracle  to 
cast  over  their  shoulders  the  bones  of  their  mother. 

irr*he  Iroquois,  according  to  Chateaubriand,  called  themselves  Ongoueo- 
noue,  the  "  men  of  always,"  signifying  that  they  were  a  race  eternal,  im- 
mortal, not  to  fade  away. — "Travels  in  America,"  2  :  93. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      157 

These  they  rightly  interpreted,  according  to  the  myth, 
to  be  the  stones  of  the  earth,  and  so  the  valleys  of  the 
ancient  world  became  populous.  Peopling  per  se  was 
not,  however,  the  object  or  the  first  object  of  the  act 
under  which  the  government,  after  the  manner  of 
Deucalion,  went  across  this  new-world  valley,  casting 
in  stoneless  areas  clods  of  earth  and  tufts  of  virgin 
sod  before  it  and  behind  it.  It  was  not  people  that  the 
government  wanted.  Indeed,  it  was  afraid  of  people. 
What  it  desired,  the  "common  good,"  was  the  immedi- 
ate payment  of  the  debt  incurred  in  the  War  of  Inde- 
pendence, and  the  only  resource  was  land.  The  land 
that  the  French  had  discovered,  whose  nominal  transfer 
to  England  Choiseul  had  said  he  had  made  to  destroy 
England's  power  in  America,  was  now  to  meet  a  por- 
tion at  least  of  the  expense  of  the  brave  struggle  for  the 
winning  of  independence.  France's  practically  un- 
touched wilderness  was  now  to  supplement  the  succor 
of  French  ships  and  arms  and  sympathy  in  the  firm 
founding  of  the  new  nation.  The  acres  that  France 
under  other  fortunes  might  have  divided  among  her 
own  descendants,  children  of  the  west,  she  gave  to  a 
happier  destiny  than  La  Salle  could  have  desired  in 
his  wildest  dreams  as  he  traversed  the  streams  that 
watered  those  first-parcelled  fields. 

So,  incidentally,  the  French  pioneers  before  the 
fact  and  the  first  settlers  of  the  west  after  the  fact 
had  their  part,  witting  or  unwitting,  willing  or  unwill- 
ing, written  or  unwritten,  along  with  George  Rogers 
Clark  and  his  men,  who  seized  the  British  forts  in  that 
territory  during  the  Revolution  (and  thus  gave  standing 
to  the  claim  for  its  transfer),  and  along  with  the  men 
of  the  Atlantic  colonies  who  sacrificed  their  fortunes 


158     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

and  their  lives — these  all  had  their  part  in  the  inaugu- 
ration of  this  experiment  in  self-government.  There 
was  no  higher,  more  far-reaching  "common  good" 
than  this  to  which  acres  prepared  from  Paleozoic  days 
and  consecrated  of  unselfish  adventure  could  be  de- 
voted. 

I  cannot  find  anywhere  in  our  history  an  apprecia- 
tion of  this  particular  contribution  to  the  foundation 
of  free  institutions  in  America.  But  it  is  one  that 
should  be  recorded  and  remembered  along  with  the 
more  tangible  contributions.  Every  perilous  journey 
of  the  French  across  that  territory  for  which  France 
got  not  a  franc,  every  purchase  which  Scotch-Irish  or 
New  England  or  other  settlers  went  out  to  conquer, 
was  a  march  or  a  skirmish  in  the  War  of  Independence, 
for  all  was  turned  to  the  confirming  of  the  fruits  of  vic- 
tory of  the  American  Revolution. 

Those  who  have  written  of  the  land  policy  which 
prescribed  the  conditions  of  sale  have  divided  its  his- 
tory roughly  into  two  periods:  the  first,  from  1783  to 
1840,  in  which  the  fiscal  considerations  of  the  general 
government  were  dominant;  and  the  second,  from  1840 
to  the  present  time,  when  the  social  conditions,  either 
within  the  territory  itself  or  in  the  nation  at  large, 
were  given  first  consideration. 

The  statistical  story  of  the  first  period,  under  that 
accurate  classification,  would  be  about  as  interesting 
as  a  bulletin  of  real-estate  transactions  in  Chicago 
would  be  to  a  professor  of  paleontology  in  the  Sor- 
bonne.  It  is  only  when  those  sales  are  considered  tel- 
eologically  (as  the  philosophers  would  say)  that  they 
can  seem  absorbingly  vital  to  others  than  economists 
or  to  the  fortunate  heirs  of  some  of  the  purchasers. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      159 

I  am  aware  (let  me  say  parenthetically)  that  cus- 
toms duties  might  have  a  somewhat  like  interpreta- 
tion under  a  higher  imaginative  power;  but  this  pos- 
sibility does  not  lessen  to  me  the  singularly  spiritual 
character  of  this  series  of  transactions — of  land  sales, 
or  transmutations  of  lands,  on  the  one  hand,  into  the 
maintenance  of  the  fabric  of  a  government  by  the 
people,  and,  on  the  other,  into  the  ruggedest,  hardiest 
species  of  men  and  women  the  world  has  known  in 
its  new  hemisphere. 

Land-offices,  as  I  have  seen  them  described  in  the 
newspapers  of  the  early  part  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
gave  no  outward  suggestion  of  being  places  of  miracles 
— sacred  places.  They  were  noisy,  dirty,  ephemeral 
tabernacles  of  canvas  or  of  boards  in  the  wilderness, 
carried  westward  till  the  day  of  permanent  temples 
should  come.  But  like  the  Ark  of  the  Covenant  in  the 
history  of  Israel,  they  blessed  those  in  whose  fields 
they  rested  on  the  way,  even  as  the  field  and  household 
of  Obed-edom  the  Gittite  were  blessed  by  the  pres- 
ence of  the  ark  on  its  way  up  to  Jerusalem  in  the  days  of 
David. 

The  initial  policy  of  the  government  was  to  sell  in 
as  great  tracts  as  possible  (the  very  reverse  of  the 
present  conserving,  anti-monopolistic  policy,  as  we  shall 
see).  The  first  sale  (1787)  was  of  nearly  a  million  acres, 
for  which  an  average  of  two-thirds  of  a  dollar  per  acre 
in  securities  worth  nine  or  ten  cents  was  received. 
This  sale,  whatever  may  be  said  for  it  as  a  part  of  a 
fiscal  policy,  was  significant  not  only  in  opening  up  a 
great  tract  (one  thousand  three  hundred  square  miles) 
but  in  the  fact  that  the  purchase  and  holding  were 
conditioned  by  certain  provisions  of  a  precious  ordi- 


160    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

nance — the  last  of  importance  of  the  old  Continental 
Congress — only  less  important  than  the  Constitution, 
which  it  preceded  by  two  years — the  "basis  of  law  and 
politics"  in  the  northwest. 

It,  moreover,  gave  precedent  for  a  policy  of  terri- 
torial control  by  the  central  government  that  has  been 
effective  even  to  the  present  time.  Daniel  Webster 
said  of  it:  "I  doubt  whether  any  single  law  of  any 
lawgiver,  ancient  or  modern,  has  produced  effects  of 
more  distinct,  marked,  and  lasting  character."1  It 
forbade  slavery  and  had  in  this  provision  an  important 
influence  on  the  history  of  the  valley.  But  there  was 
another  far-reaching  and  a  positive  provision  which 
must  be  of  special  interest  to  the  people  of  France  even 
to-day.  Its  preamble  lies  in  this  memorable  passage: 
"Religion,  morality,  and  knowledge  being  necessary  to 
good  government  and  the  happiness  of  mankind,  schools 
and  the  means  of  education  shall  forever  be  encour- 
aged." As  to  the  specific  means  of  encouraging  religion, 
morality,  and  knowledge,  and  so,  ultimately,  of  pro- 
moting good  government  and  the  happiness  of  man- 
kind, it  was  proposed  by  the  representative  of  the  Ohio 
Company,  which  stood  ready  to  purchase  a  million 
acres,  that  the  government  should  give  support  both 
to  education  and  religion,  as  was  done  in  New  England, 
and  as  follows:  one  lot  in  each  township  (that  is,  a 
section  one  mile  square  in  every  tract  six  miles  square) 
to  be  reserved  for  the  common  schools,  another  for  the 
support  of  the  ministry,  and  four  whole  townships,  in 
the  whole  tract,  for  the  maintenance  of  a  university. 
Congress  thought  this  too  liberal,  but  finally,  under 

1  First  Speech  on  Foot's  Resolution  in  "Writings  and  Speeches  of  Daniel 
Webster,"  national  edition,  5  :  263. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      161 

the  stress  of  need  of  revenue  which  the  high-minded, 
reverend  lobbyist,  Reverend  Menasseh  Cutler,  was 
prepared  through  his  company  to  furnish,  acceded, 
with  a  reduction  only  of  the  proposed  appropriation  to 
the  university.  The  provision  specifically  was:  "Lot 
number  sixteen  to  be  given  perpetually  by  Congress 
to  the  maintenance  of  schools,  and  lot  number  twenty- 
nine  to  the  purpose  of  religion  in  the  said  townships; 
two  townships  near  the  center  and  of  good  land  to  be 
also  given  by  Congress  for  the  support  of  a  literary  in- 
stitution, to  be  applied  to  the  intended  object  by  the 
legislature  of  the  State." 

A  second  great  tract  was  sold  the  same  year  under 
similar  conditions.  This  was  the  last  occasion  on  which 
provision  for  the  support  of  religion  was  made  by  the 
national  Congress,  and  what  came  of  this  particular 
grant  I  have  not  followed  beyond  the  statement  below.1 

But  the  "section-sixteen"  allotment  for  the  aid  of 
public  schools  continued  as  a  feature  of  all  future  grants 
within  the  Northwest  Territory,  and  also  in  all  the  new 
States  of  the  southwestern  and  trans-Mississippi  ter- 
ritory erected  prior  to  1850,  from  which  time  forward 
two  sections  in  each  township  (sixteen  and  thirty-six) 
were  granted  for  school  purposes,  besides  specific  grants 
for  higher  education  amounting  to  over  a  million  acres. 

A  recent  student2  of  this  subject  has  traced  this 
policy  of  public  aid  to  education  back  through  New 

1  In  1828  Ohio  petitioned  for  permission  to  sell  the  lands  reserved  for 
religious  purposes,  and  in  1833  this  was  granted.  The  proceeds  of  the  sales 
were  to  be  invested  and  used  for  the  support  of  religion,  under  the  direction 
of  the  legislature  within  the  townships  in  which  the  reserves  were  located. 
— Payson  J.  Treat,  "The  National  Land  System,  1785-1820." 

2  Joseph  Shafer,  "The  Origin  of  the  System  of  Land  Grants  for  Educa- 
tion." Bulletin  of  the  University  of  Wisconsin,  No.  63.  History  Series, 
Vol.  1,  No.  1,  August,  1902. 


162     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

England,  where  colonies,  in  grants  to  companies  or 
townships,  made  specific  stipulations  and  reservations 
for  the  support  of  schools  and  the  ministry  and  where 
townships  voluntarily  often  made  like  disposition  of  sur- 
plus wild  lands;  and  through  New  England  to  England 
of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  where,  the 
monasteries  and  other  religious  foundations  being  de- 
stroyed and  the  schools  depending  upon  them  perish- 
ing, schools  were  endowed  by  the  kings,  sometimes  out 
of  sequestered  church  lands,  or  were  established  by 
towns  and  counties,  in  addition  to  those  chartered 
under  private  patronage,  so  strong  was  the  new  edu- 
cational movement  of  the  time. 

In  the  Mississippi  Valley,  then,  or  the  greater  part 
of  it — whatever  the  historical  origin  of  the  provisions 
may  be — from  one-thirty-sixth  to  one-eighteenth  of 
the  public  land  has  been  set  apart  to  the  education  of 
generation  after  generation  till  the  end  of  the  republic 
— or  as  Americans  would  be  disposed  to  put  it  in 
synonymous  phrase,  "till  the  end  of  time." 

Acres  vary  in  size,  one  of  our  eminent  horticultur- 
ists has  reminded  us,  measured  in  terms  of  produc- 
tivity. And  the  gifts  to  the  various  townships  have 
been  by  no  means  of  the  same  size,  measured  in  terms 
of  revenue  for  school  purposes.  "Number  sixteen" 
may  sometimes  have  fallen  in  shallow  soil  or  on  stony 
ground  and  "thirty-six"  in  swamp  or  alkali  land. 
The  lottery  of  nature  is  as  hard-hearted  as  the  lotteries 
of  human  devising;  but  the  general  provision  has 
put  an  obligation  upon  the  other  thirty-five  or  thirty- 
four  sections  in  every  township  that  I  suppose  is  seldom 
evaded.  The  child's  acres  are  practically  never,  I  sus- 
pect, less  valuable  than  the  richest  and  largest  of  those 


THE   PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      163 

in  the  township  about  it,  for  the  reason  that  the  dif- 
ference is  made  good  by  the  local  taxpayer.  The  child's 
acre  is,  as  a  rule,  then,  as  large  as  the  largest,  the  most 
productive  acre.  And  roughly  there  are  fifty  thousand 
of  those  little  plots  in  that  domain — fifty  thousand 
sections  a  mile  square,  thirty-two  million  acres  reserved 
from  the  beginning  of  time,  theoretically  at  least,  to 
the  end  of  time.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  they  are  not  to 
be  distinguished  objectively  from  other  acres  now; 
they  are  to  be  distinguished  only  subjectively,  that  is, 
as  one  thinks  of  what  is  grown  year  by  year  in  the 
schools,  to  which  their  proceeds,  if  not  their  products, 
are  given. 

I  quoted  above  an  estimate  made  in  1803  of  what 
might  have  been  done  with  the  fifteen  million  dollars, 
paid  to  the  French  for  Louisiana.  One  alternative  sug- 
gested was  the  permanent  endowment  of  eighteen  hun- 
dred free  schools,  allowing  five  hundred  dollars  a  year 
per  school  and  accommodating  ninety  thousand  pupils. 
The  public-school  allotment  for  that  part  of  the  valley 
alone  is  fifteen  million  acres.  Even  at  two  dollars  an 
acre  (a  very  low  estimate),  the  endowment  is  twice 
the  total  amount  paid  for  Louisiana — and  I  am  esti- 
mating this  school  acreage  at  but  one  thirty-sixth  in- 
stead of  one-eighteenth  of  the  total  acreage.  There- 
fore, France  may,  in  a  sense,  be  said  to  have  given 
these  acres  to  the  support  of  the  "children  of  always" 
— since  these  plots  alone  have  probably  yielded  many 
times  the  purchase  price  of  the  entire  territory. 

To  be  sure,  these  white  plots,  as  I  would  have  them 
marked  on  a  map  of  the  valley,  have  in  many  States 
been  sold  and  occupied  as  the  other  plots,  with  only 
this  distinction,  that  the  proceeds  are  inviolably  set 


164    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

apart  to  this  sacred  use,  as  certain  parts  of  animals 
were,  under  Mosaic  law,  reserved  for  public  sacrifice. 
In  one  trans-Mississippi  State,  Iowa,  for  example,  of 
a  total  grant  of  1,013,614.21  acres1  (less  what  the 
boundary  rivers,  the  Mississippi  and  the  Missouri,  had 
carried  away  in  their  voracious  encroachments,  and 
plus  what  other  natural  agents  had  added),  only  200 
acres  remained  unsold  in  191 1. 

As  we  view  the  policy  from  the  year  1903  and  from 
the  midst  of  a  populous  valley,  in  which  land  values 
have  risen  from  one  dollar  and  twenty-five  cents  per 
acre  to  a  hundred  or  two  hundred  dollars  in  most 
fertile  farm  tracts,  and  to  thousands  in  urban  centres, 
we  can  but  regret  that  these  lands  themselves  had 
not  been  held  inviolate,  and  can  but  wish  that  only 
their  rentals  had  been  devoted  to  the  high  uses  to  which 
the  nation  and  State  had  consecrated  these  lands. 
This  policy  would  have  put  in  the  heart  of  every  town- 
ship a  common  field  whose  rental  would  have  grown 
with  the  development  of  the  country.  It  would  have 
furnished  fruitful  data  for  comparison  between  two 
systems  of  land  tenure.  And  it  would  have  kept  ever 
visibly,  tangibly  before  the  people  their  heritage  and 
their  obligation.  As  it  is,  one  has  to  use  the  greatest 
imagination  in  translating  the  figures  in  a  State  trea- 
surer's or  county  supervisor's  report,  back  into  the 
little  plots  that  gathered  into  the  soil  of  their  acres  the 
noblest  purposes  that  ever  animated  a  nation — these 
spots  where  one  generation  made  its  unselfish  prayer 
and  sacrifice  for  the  next. 

That  the  purpose  still  exists,  despite  the  passing  of 

1  Iowa,  1,013,614.21  acres  from  section  16  and  535,473.76  acres  by  con- 
gressional grant  in  1841. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      165 

the  tangible  symbol,  and  that  the  prayer  is  still  made  in 
every  township  of  that  territory,  where  even  a  few  chil- 
dren live,  is  evidenced  by  the  fact  that  every  two 
miles  north  and  south,  east  and  west  of  settled  region 
there  stands  a  schoolhouse.  I  shall  speak  later  of  this 
wide-spread  provision,  not  only  for  universal  elementary 
education  but  also  for  secondary  and  higher  educa- 
tion, ordained  of  the  people  and  for  the  people,  to  be 
paid  for  by  the  people  out  of  their  common  treasury. 
But  attention  must  here  be  called,  in  passing,  to  the 
fact  that  the  parcelling  of  the  domain  of  Louis  XIV 
in  the  new  world  fixed  irrevocably  the  public  school 
in  the  national  consciousness  and  purpose  and  made  it 
the  foundation  of  a  purely  democratic  social  system 
and  the  nourisher  of  a  more  highly  efficient  democratic 
political  system. 

On  the  Atlantic  side  of  the  mountains  there  was 
bitter  controversy  between  those  who  held  that  educa- 
tion was  necessary  for  the  preservation  of  free  institu- 
tions and  those  who  held  that  free  education  increased 
taxation  unduly;  between  those  who  desired  and  those 
who  regretted  the  breaking  down  of  social  barriers 
which  both  claimed  would  ensue  as  a  result  of  such 
education;  between  those  who  regarded  education  as 
a  natural  right  and  those  who  considered  taxation  for 
such  a  purpose  a  violation  of  the  rights  of  the  in- 
dividual; between  those  who  saw  in  it  a  panacea  for 
poverty  and  distress  and  those  who  urged  that  it 
would  not  benefit  the  masses;  and,  finally,  between 
those  of  one  sect  and  race  and  those  of  another.  But 
in  the  trans-Alleghany  country  north  of  the  Ohio,  and 
in  all  the  territory  west  of  the  Mississippi  (practically 
coterminous,  let  me  again  remind  you,  with  that  region 
where  the  French  were  pioneers  within  the  present 


1 66  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

bounds  of  the  United  States)  there  was  practically  no 
dissension,  though  the  provision  was  meagre  at  the 
start.  The  public  school  had  no  more  of  the  atmos- 
phere or  character  of  a  charity,  a  "pauper"  school 
than  the  highway  provided  for  out  of  the  same  grant, 
where  rich  and  poor  met  in  absolute  equality  of  right 
and  opportunity.  It  became  the  pride  of  a  people,  the 
expression  of  the  people's  ideal,  the  corner-stone  of  the 
people's  hope.  I  suppose  that  three-fourths  of  the  chil- 
dren of  the  territory  whose  ranges  have  been  surveyed 
by  the  magic  chains  forged  of  this  first  great  parcelling 
ordinance  have  had  the  tuition  of  the  public  schools — 
future  Presidents  of  the  United  States,  justices,  rail- 
road and  university  presidents,  farmers,  artisans,  art- 
ists, and  poets  alike. 

So  while  it  was  desire  for  revenue  that  prompted 
the  early  sales  of  the  public  domain  in  the  Mississippi 
Valley,  the  nation  got  in  return  not  only  means  to  help 
pay  its  Revolution  debt,  but,  incidentally,  settlements 
of  highly  individualistic,  self-dependent,  and  inter- 
dependent pioneers,  gathered  about  one  highly  pater- 
nalistic or  maternalistic  institution — the  public  school. 
The  credit  for  this  has  gone  to  New  England  and  New 
York,  but  the  "white  acres"  came  of  the  territory  and 
the  riches  of  Nouvelle  France. 

You  will  not  wish  to  follow  in  detail  the  ministra- 
tions of  the  priests  of  the  land-offices  and  the  surveys 
of  the  men  of  the  magic  chains,  for  it  is  a  long  and 
tedious  story  that  would  fill  thousands  of  pages,  and 
in  the  end  only  obscure  the  real  significance  of  the 
movement.  Here  is  a  summary  of  allotments  made  up 
to  1904  of  all  the  public  domain,  that  of  the  Missis- 
sippi Valley  being  somewhat  more  than  half.1 

1  See  Report  of  the  Public  Lands  Commission,  Washington,  1905. 


THE   PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      167 

Private  land  claims,  donations  etc.  (the  first  of  acres 

the  latter  being  made  to  the  early  French 

settlers) 33,400,000 

Wagon-road,  canal,  and  river  improvement 
grants  (provision  for  the  narrow  strips  of 
common  that  intersect  each  other  at  every 

mile  of  the  settled  parts  of  the  valley) 9,700,000 

Railroad  grants  for  the  subsidizing  of  the  pri- 
vate building  of  railways  chiefly  up  and  down 

and  across  the  valley 1 17,600,000 

Swamp-land  grants  (being  tracts  of  wet  or  over- 
flowed lands  given  to  the  various  States  for 

reclamation) 65,700,000 

School  grants  to  States  (those  which  we  have 

been  considering) 69,000,000 

Other  grants  to  States  (largely  for  educational 

purposes) 20,600,000 

Military  and  naval  land  warrants 61,000,000 

Scrip  issued  for  various  purposes  (chiefly  in 

view  of  service  to  the  government) 9,300,000 

Allotment  to  individual  Indians 15,100,000 

Mineral  lands  (under  special  entries) 1,700,000 

Homestead  entries  (that  is,  by  settlers  taking 
claims  under  homestead  acts  of  which  I  shall 

speak  later) 96,500,000 

Timber-culture  entries  (final) 9,700,000 

Timber  and  stone  entries 7,600,000 

Cash  entries,  including  entries  under  the  pre- 
emption and  other  acts 276,600,000 

Reservoir  rights  of  way 300,000 

Forest  reserves  (tracts  of  forest  land  permanently 

reserved  from  sale) 57,900,000 

For  national  reclaiming  purposes 39,911,000 

Reserved  for  public  purposes  (public  buildings, 

forts,  etc.) 6,700,000 

Indian  reservations 73,000,000 

Entries  pending 39,500,000 

Unappropriated  public  land 841,872,377 

Total  {including  Alaska) 1,852,683,377 


168     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

By  June  30,  191 2,  homestead  entries  had  increased 
to  127,800,000  acres;  timber  and  stone  entries  to 
13,060,000  acres;  forest  reserves  to  187,400,000  acres, 
and  there  was  left  682,984,762  acres,  more  than  half 
of  which  was  in  Alaska;  that  is,  of  the  billion  and 
a  half  of  acres,  exclusive  of  Alaska,  over  a  billion  have 
been  sold  to  private  uses,  granted  in  aid  of  private 
enterprises,  used  for  public  improvements,  appro- 
priated forever  to  public  uses,  or  given  to  the  support 
of  education. 

The  controlling  motive  at  the  start,  I  repeat,  was 
revenue.  But  gradually  the  people,  seeing  great 
tracts  of  land  held  unimproved  for  speculation,  seeing 
the  domain  of  free  land  narrowing  while  the  pressure 
of  want  was  beginning  to  make  itself  felt  east  of  the 
mountains,  as  in  Europe,  and  feeling  concerned,  as 
some  men  of  vision  did,  at  the  passing  of  the  world's 
great  opportunity  for  the  practical  realization  of  man's 
natural  right  to  the  land  without  disturbing  the  sys- 
tem in  force  in  older  settled  communities,  the  people 
strove  to  effect  the  subordination  of  revenue  to  the 
social  good  of  the  frontier  and  the  country  at  large. 
By  the  middle  of  the  century  this  many-motived  feel- 
ing had  expression  in  a  party  platform;  that  "the 
public  lands — belong  to  the  people  and  should  not  be 
sold  to  individuals  nor  granted  to  corporations,  but 
should  be  held  as  a  sacred  trust  for  the  benefit  of  the 
people  and  should  be  granted  in  limited  quantities, 
free  of  cost,  to  landless  settlers."1 

It  was  ten  years  before  this  doctrine  became  em- 
bodied in  law  over  the  signature  of  Abraham  Lincoln, 
but  the  agitation  for  its  enactment  had  been  active  for 

1  Free-Soil  Democratic  Platform,  1852,  p.  12. 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      169 

thirty  years,  beginning  with  the  cry  of  a  poor  printer 
in  New  York  City,1  taught  of  French  doctrine,  who  in 
season  and  out  kept  asserting  the  equal  right  of  man 
to  land.  It  was  as  a  voice  in  the  wilderness  proclaim- 
ing a  plan  of  salvation  to  the  already  congested  areas 
on  the  seashore  and,  incidentally,  a  means  of  making 
the  wilderness  blossom.  He  was  not  then  a  disciple 
of  Fourier  (as  many  of  his  associates  were  and  he  him- 
self had  been  originally),  threatening  vested  privileges 
of  rights;  he  did  not  preach  a  communistic  division  of 
property;  he  was  an  individualistic  idealist  and  saw 
in  the  opening  of  this  wild,  unoccupied  land,  not  to 
speculators  or  to  alien  purchasers,  but  to  actual  set- 
tlers permitted  to  pre-empt  in  quarter-sections  (one 
hundred  and  sixty  acres)  and  forbidden  to  alienate  it, 
a  means  of  social  regeneration  that  would  not  disturb 
the  titles  to  property  already  granted  to  individuals 
by  the  State,  and  yet  would  bless  all  the  property- 
less,  for  there  was  enough  free  land  for  every  landless 
man  who  wanted  it,  and  would  be  for  decades  if  not 
for  centuries  beyond  their  lives,  or  so  he  thought.2 

A  German  economist  has  expressed  the  view  that  it 
was  only  this  movement,  so  inaugurated,  that  prevented 
America  from  going  into  socialism.  One  of  our  fore- 
most economists  in  America,  in  discussing  this  very 
subject,  begins  with  these  observations: 

"The  French  are  a  nation  of  philosophers.  Starting 
with  the  theory  of  the  rights  of  man,  they  build  up  a 
logical  system,  then  a  revolution,  and  the  theory  goes 
into  practice.    Next  a  coup  d'etat  and  an  emperor. 

1  George  Henry  Evans. 

2  See  J.  R.  Commons,  "  Documentary  History  of  American  Industrial 
Society,"  VII  :  287-349. 


170    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

"The  English  are  a  nation  without  too  much  philos- 
ophy or  logic.  They  piece  out  their  constitution  at 
the  spot  where  it  becomes  tight.  .  .  .  They  are  prac- 
tical .  .  .  unlogical. 

"The  Americans  are  French  in  their  logic  and  En- 
glish in  their  use  of  logic.  They  announce  the  uni- 
versal rights  of  man  and  then  enact  into  law  enough 
to  augment  the  rights  of  property." 

The  homestead  law  owed  its  origin  to  the  doctrine 
of  natural  rights,  whose  transcendental  glory  faded 
often  into  the  light  of  common  day  during  the  discus- 
sions but  still  enhaloes  a  very  practical  and  matter-of- 
fact  statute.  Economic  reasons,  both  of  eastern  and 
western  motive,  were  gathered  under  the  banner  of 
its  idealism,  till  finally  it  came  to  be  an  ensign  not 
only  of  free  soil  for  the  landless  but  of  free  soil  for 
the  slaves.  The  "homestead"  movement  put  an  end 
to  slavery,  even  if  within  a  half  century  it  has  ex- 
hausted in  its  generosity  the  nation's  domain  of  arable 
land.  The  voice  in  the  wilderness  cried  for  a  legalized 
natural  right  that  would  not  disturb  vested  rights,  for 
an  individualism  based  on  private  property  given  with- 
out cost,  for  equality  by  a  limitation  of  that  property 
to  one  hundred  and  sixty  acres,  and  finally  for  the 
inalienability  from  sale  or  mortgage  of  that  little  plot 
of  earth.  Thirty  years  later  the  natural  right  to  un- 
occupied land  was  recognized,  individualistic  society 
was  strengthened  by  the  great  increase  in  the  number 
of  property  holders,  and  inalienability  was  recognized 
by  the  States;  but  the  failure  to  reserve  the  free  lands 
to  such  actual  settlers  alone  and  to  limit  the  amount 
of  the  holding  left  the  way  open  for  railroad  grants, 
which   alone  have  in  two  generations   exceeded   the 


THE  PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      171 

homestead    entries,    and    for   the    amassing   of  great 
stretches  by  a  few. 

The  logic  of  France,  speaking  through  the  voice  of 
that  leader  and  other  men  such  as  Horace  Greeley, 
led  the  later  exodus  as  certainly  as  her  pioneers  opened 
the  way  for  the  first  American  settlers.  And  though 
the  logic  was  applied  in  English  fashion,  yet  it  had  a 
notable  part  in  making,  as  I  have  just  said,  the  free 
soil  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  contribute  to  the  freeing 
of  a  whole  people  in  slavery,  inside  and  outside  of  the 
valley.  That  logic  learned  in  France  would  doubtless 
have  accomplished  a  conclusion  needing  less  patch- 
ing and  opportunistic  repair  if  the  immediate  interests 
of  those  of  the  frontiers,  those  who  wanted  immediate 
settlement  and  development,  had  not  disturbed  one 
of  the  premises.  At  any  rate,  a  great  and  perhaps  the 
last  opportunity  to  carry  such  doctrines  to  their  con- 
clusions without  overturning  all  social  and  industrial 
institutions  has  gone  by.  A  half-billion  acres  of  in- 
alienable farms,  all  of  the  same  size,  trespassing  upon 
no  ancient  rights,  interspersed  with  the  white  blocks 
held  for  the  education  of  the  children  of  that  free  soil, 
might  have  furnished  an  example  for  all  time  to  be 
followed  or  shunned — if,  indeed,  all  acres  had  been 
born  of  the  primeval  sea  and  glaciers  not  only  free  but 
equal  in  size.  As  it  was,  some  acres  were  born  large 
and  some  small,  some  fruitful  and  some  barren,  some 
with  gold  in  their  mouths  and  some  with  only  the 
taste  of  alkali;  and  only  an  infinite  wisdom  could  have 
adjusted  them  to  the  unequal  capacities  of  that  army 
of  land  lackers  who  declared  themselves  free  and 
equal,  and  who,  with  free-soil  banners,  advanced  to 
the  territory  where  the  squatters  became  sovereigns 
and  homesteads  became  castles. 


172     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

President  Andrew  Johnson  (who  as  a  congressman, 
in  1852,  made  the  seven-hundred-year  prophecy) 
estimated  that  a  homestead  (of  one  hundred  and  sixty 
acres)  would  increase  every  homesteader's  purchasing 
ability  by  one  hundred  dollars  a  year;  and  if  (he 
argued)  the  government  enacted  a  30-per-cent  duty 
it  would  be  reimbursed  in  seven  years  in  the  amount 
of  two  hundred  and  ten  dollars,  or  ten  dollars  more 
than  the  cost  of  the  homestead.  By  such  reckoning 
he  reached  the  conclusion  that  the  homesteaders  would 
defray  the  expenses  of  the  government  for  a  period 
of  four  thousand  three  hundred  and  ninety-two  years 
— each  homesteader  of  the  nine  millions  contributing 
indirectly  twenty-four  thousand  four  hundred  dollars 
in  seven  hundred  years  and  all  of  them  two  hundred 
and  nineteen  billion  six  hundred  million  dollars — a 
scheme  as  ingenious,  says  one,  as  Fourier's  "scheme  to 
pay  off  the  national  debt  of  France  with  a  setting 
hen."1 

There  are  approximately  nine  million  homes  (or 
homes,  tenements,  and  flats)  in  that  domain  to-day, 
and  it  is  quite  easily  demonstrable  that  they  not  only 
contribute  to  the  support  of  government,  directly  and 
indirectly,  far  more  than  the  seemingly  fantastic  esti- 
mates of  Andrew  Johnson  suggested  but  also  give  to 
the  world  a  surplus  of  product  undreamed  of  even  in 
1850.  It  is  hardly  likely  that  any  system  of  parcelling 
would  have  more  rapidly  developed  this  vast  domain. 
There  is  a  question  as  to  whether  some  more  logical, 
conserving,  long-viewed  policy  might  not  have  been 
devised  for  the  "common  good"  of  the  generations 

1  Speech  on  the  bill  to  encourage  agriculture,  July  25,  1850.  Speeches  on 
the  homestead  bill,  April  29,  1852,  and  May  20,  1858. 


THE   PARCELLING  OF  THE  DOMAIN      173 

that  are  yet  to  occupy  that  valley  with  the  generation 
that  is  there  and  the  three  or  four  generations  that 
have  already  gone.  It  is  that  "common  good"  that  is 
now  engaging  the  thought  of  our  foremost  economists, 
natural  scientists,  and  public  men.  Of  that  I  shall 
speak  later. 

Here  we  celebrate  merely  the  fact  that  there  are  fifty 
or  sixty  million  geographical  descendants  of  France 
living  in  the  midst  of  the  valley  at  the  mouth  of  whose 
river  La  Salle  took  immediate  possession  for  Louis 
XIV,  but  prophetic  possession  for  all  the  peoples  that 
might  in  any  time  find  dwelling  there. 


CHAPTER  IX 
IN  THE  TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS 

["T  is  a  mistake,"  said  one  of  the  statesmen  of  the 
Mississippi  Valley,  Senator  Thomas  H.  Benton, 
"to  suppose  that  none  but  men  of  science  lay 
off  a  road.  There  is  a  class  of  topographical  engineers 
older  than  the  schools  and  more  unerring  than  the 
mathematicians.  They  are  the  wild  animals — buffalo, 
elk,  deer,  antelope,  bears — which  traverse  the  forest 
not  by  compass  but  by  an  instinct  which  leads  them 
always  the  right  way — to  the  lowest  passes  in  the 
mountains,  the  shallowest  fords  in  the  rivers,  the  rich- 
est pastures  in  the  forests,  the  best  salt  springs,  and  the 
shortest  practicable  lines  between  remote  points.  They 
travel  thousands  of  miles,  have  their  annual  migra- 
tions backwards  and  forwards,  and  never  miss  the 
best  and  shortest  route.  These  are  the  first  engineers 
to  lay  out  a  road  in  a  new  country;  the  Indians  fol- 
low them,  and  hence  a  buffalo  road  becomes  a  war- 
path. The  first  white  hunters  follow  the  same  trails 
in  pursuing  their  game;  and  after  that  the  buffalo 
road  becomes  the  wagon  road  of  the  white  man,  and 
finally  the  macadamized  road  or  railroad  of  the  scien- 
tific man."1 

A  hunter  of  wild  sheep  in  the  Rocky  Mountains 
following  their  trails  wonders  if  they  were  made  a 

1  Speech  on  a  bill  for  the  construction  of  a  highway  to  the  Pacific,  De- 
cember 16,  1850. 

174 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     175 

year,  five,  or  ten  years  ago,  and  is  told  by  the  scientist 
at  his  side  that  they  may  have  been  sixteen  thousand 
years  old,  so  long  have  these  first  engineers  been  at 
work.  In  some  places  of  Europe,  I  am  told,  their  fel- 
low engineers,  longer  in  the  practice  of  their  profession, 
have  actually  worn  paths  in  the  rocks  by  their  cush- 
ioned feet. 

It  is  a  mistake,  therefore,  we  are  reminded,  to  sup- 
pose that  the  forests  and  plains  of  the  Mississippi 
Valley  were  trackless.  They  were  coursed  by  many 
paths.  If  you  have  by  chance  read  Chateaubriand's 
"Atala,"  you  will  have  a  rather  different  notion  of  the 
American  forests,  especially  of  the  Mississippi  Valley. 
"On  the  western  side  of  the  Mississippi,"  he  wrote, 
"the  waves  of  verdure  on  the  limitless  plains  (savannas) 
appear  as  they  recede  to  rise  gradually  into  the  azure 
sky";  but  on  the  eastern  half  of  the  valley,  "trees  of 
every  form,  of  every  color,  and  of  every  perfume 
throng  and  grow  together,  stretching  up  into  the  air 
to  heights  that  weary  the  eye  to  follow.  Wild  vines 
.  .  .  intertwine  each  other  at  the  feet  of  these  trees, 
escalade  their  trunks  and  creep  along  to  the  extremity 
of  their  branches,  stretching  from  the  maple  to  the 
tulip-tree,  from  the  tulip-tree  to  the  hollyhock,  and 
thus  forming  thousands  of  grottos,  arches  and  porticos. 
Often,  in  their  wanderings  from  tree  to  tree,  these 
creepers  cross  the  arm  of  a  river,  over  which  they  throw 
a  bridge  of  flowers.  .  .  .  A  multitude  of  animals  spread 
about  life  and  enchantment.  From  the  extremities  of 
the  avenues  may  be  seen  bears,  intoxicated  with  the 
grape,  staggering  upon  the  branches  of  the  elm-trees; 
caribous  bathe  in  the  lake;  black  squirrels  play  among 
the  thick  foliage;  mocking-birds,  and  Virginian  pigeons 


176     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

not  bigger  than  sparrows,  fly  down  upon  the  turf,  red- 
dened with  strawberries;  green  parrots  with  yellow 
heads,  purple  woodpeckers,  cardinals  red  as  fire,  clamber 
up  to  the  very  tops  of  the  cypress-trees;  humming-birds 
sparkle  upon  the  jessamine  of  the  Floridas;  and  bird- 
catching  serpents  hiss  while  suspended  to  the  domes 
of  the  woods,  where  they  swing  about  like  creepers 
themselves.  .  .  .  All  here  ...  is  sound  and  motion. 
.  .  .  When  a  breeze  happens  to  animate  these  soli- 
tudes, to  swing  these  floating  bodies,  to  confound  these 
masses  of  white,  blue,  green,  and  pink,  to  mix  all  the 
colors  and  to  combine  all  the  murmurs,  there  issue 
such  sounds  from  the  depths  of  the  forests,  and  such 
things  pass  before  the  eyes,  that  I  should  in  vain  en- 
deavor to  describe  them  to  those  who  have  never 
visited  these  primitive  fields  of  nature."  And  when 
Rene  and  Atala  were  escaping  through  those  forests 
they  "advanced  with  difficulty  under  a  vault  of  smilax, 
amidst  vines,  indigo-plants,  bean-trees,  and  creeping- 
ivy  that  entangled  our  feet  like  nets.  .  .  .  Bell  ser- 
pents were  hissing  in  every  direction,  and  wolves, 
bears,  carcajous  and  young  tigers,  come  to  hide  them- 
selves in  these  retreats,  made  them  resound  with  their 
roarings."1 

A  trackless,  howling  wilderness,  indeed,  if  we  are  to 
accept  this  as  an  accurate  description  of  scenes  which, 
as  I  have  intimated,  it  is  now  suspected  that  Chateau- 
briand's imagination  visited,  unaccompanied  of  his 
body.  But  a  recent  indigenous  writer  on  the  valley 
and  its  roads — having  in  mind,  to  be  sure,  the  forests 
a  little  farther  north  than  those  in  which  Atala  and 
Rene  wandered — assures   us  that  they  were  neither 

1  Chateaubriand,  "Atala,"  trans.  Harry,  pp.  2,  3,  19. 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     177 

"pathless"  nor  "howling."  He  writes  that  in  1775 
(eighteen  years  before  the  first  white  settlement  in 
the  State  of  Ohio)  there  were  probably  as  many  paths 
within  the  bounds  of  that  State  on  which  a  man  could 
travel  on  horseback  at  the  rate  of  five  miles  an  hour  as 
there  are  railways  in  that  State  to-day.  And  the 
buffalo  paths  were — some  of  them,  at  any  rate — roads 
so  wide  that  several  wagons  might  have  been  driven 
abreast  on  them — as  wide  as  the  double-track  railroads. 
So  the  Indian  farther  west  had  his  highways  prepared 
for  him  by  the  instincts  of  these  primitive  engineers 
that  knew  nothing  of  trigonometry  or  the  sextant  or 
the  places  of  the  stars.1 

Nor  did  these  first  makers  of  roads  howl  or  bellow 
their  way  over  them.  On  this  same  authority  (Hul- 
bert)  I  am  able  to  assure  you  that  the  forest  paths 
were  noiseless  "traces,"  as  they  were  originally  called, 
in  the  midst  of  silences  disturbed  only  by  the  wind  and 
the  falling  waters.  Wolves  did  sometimes  howl  in  the 
forests  or  out  upon  the  plains,  but  it  was  only  in  hunger 
and  in  accentuation  of  the  usual  silence.  Neither  they 
nor  the  bears  growled  or  howled,  except  when  they 
came  into  collision  with  each  other,  or  starvation. 

And  there  were  not  even  birds  to  give  cheer  to  the 
gloom  of  these  black  forests,  whose  tree  tops  were 
knitted  together  by  vines,  but  had  no  undergrowth, 
since  the  sun  could  not  reach  the  ground.  "The  birds 
of  the  forest  came  only  with  the  white  man."  There 
were  parrots  in  Kentucky,  and  there  were  in  Ohio 
pigeons  and  birds  of  prey,  eagles  and  buzzards,  but 
the  birds  we  know  to-day  and  the  bees  were  later  im- 
migrants from  lands  that  remembered  Aristophanes  or 

1  Hulbert,  "Historic  Highways,"  vol.  I,  pt.  II. 


178     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  hills  of  Hymettus,  or  that  knew  Shelley's  skylark 
or  Keats's  nightingale  or  Rostand's  tamer  fowls  or 
Maeterlinck's  bees. 

Even  if  we  allow  to  the  forests  Chateaubriand's 
color  in  summer  and  the  clamor  in  times  of  terror — 
color  and  clamor  which  only  a  keen  eye  and  ear  would 
have  seen  and  heard — we  cannot  longer  think  of  them 
as  pathless,  if  inhabited  by  those  ancient  pathmakers, 
the  buffalo,  deer,  sheep.  And,  naturally,  when  the  In- 
dian came,  dependent  as  he  was  upon  wild  game,  he 
followed  these  paths  or  traces  made  and  frequented 
by  the  beasts — the  ways  to  food,  to  water,  to  salt,  to 
other  habitats  with  the  changing  seasons.  The  buffalo 
roads  and  the  deer  trails  became  his  vocational  trails 
— the  streets  of  his  livelihood.  And  as  his  enemy  was 
likely  to  find  him  by  following  these  traces,  they 
became  not  only  the  paths  of  peace  but  the  paths  of 
war.  When  the  red  man  trespassed  upon  the  peaceful 
trails  of  his  enemy,  he  was,  in  an  American  idiom,  "on 
the  war-path." 

Then  in  time  the  European  trader  went  in  friendly 
search  of  the  Indian  by  these  same  paths,  and  they 
became  the  avenues  of  petty  commerce.  As  street 
venders  in  Paris,  so  these  forest  traders  or  runners  went 
up  and  down  these  sheltered  paths,  as  dark  in  summer 
as  the  narrowest  streets,  only  they  went  silently,  though 
they  were  often  heard  as  distinctly  in  the  breaking  of 
twigs  or  in  their  muffled  tread  by  the  alert  ears  of  the 
Indians  as  the  musical  voices  of  these  venders  are 
heard  in  the  city.  And  the  places  where  these  traders 
put  down  their  cheap  trinkets  before  their  dusky 
patrons  grew  into  trading-posts,  prophetic  of  future 
cities  and  towns. 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS   DE  BOIS     179 

Such  were  the  paths  by  which  the  runners  of  the 
woods,  the  French  coureurs  de  bois,  first  emerged — 
after  following  the  watercourses — upon  the  western 
forest  glades  and  the  edges  of  the  prairies  and  as- 
tonished the  aboriginal  human  owners  of  those  wild 
highways  that  had  known  only  the  soft  feet  of  the 
wolf  and  fox  and  bear,  the  hoofs  of  the  buffalo  and 
deer,  and  the  bare  feet  or  the  moccasins  of  the  In- 
dians (the  "silent  shoes,"  as  I  have  seen  such  foot- 
gear advertised  in  Boulevard  St.  Germain). 

It  has  been  said  by  a  chemist  of  some  repute  that 
man  came,  in  his  evolution,  out  of  the  sea;  that  he 
has  in  his  veins  certain  elements — potassium,  calcium, 
magnesium,  sodium — in  the  same  ratio  in  which  they 
appeared  in  the  water  of  the  Pre-Cambrian  ocean. 
Whether  this  be  true  or  not,  one  stage  of  human  de- 
velopment carries  marks  of  the  forest,  and  from  that 
period  "having  nothing  but  forest  knowledge,  forest 
dreams,  forest  fancies,  forest  faith,"  as  an  American 
writer  has  said,  man  emerges  upon  the  plains  of  his- 
tory. 

So,  though  the  French  civilization  still  smells  and 
sounds  of  the  sea,  and  followed  the  streams  that  kept 
its  first  men  in  touch  with  it,  it  had  finally,  in  its  pio- 
neering, to  take  to  the  trails  and  the  forests.  And 
these  runners  of  the  woods  were  the  amphibious  am- 
bassadors from  this  kingdom  of  the  sea  to  the  kingdom 
of  the  land.  They  were,  as  Etienne  Brule  of  Cham- 
plain's  time,  the  pioneers  of  pioneers  who,  often  in 
unrecorded  advance  of  priest  and  explorer,  pushed  their 
adventurous  traffic  in  French  guns  and  hatchets, 
French  beads  and  cloth,  French  tobacco  and  brandy, 
till  they  knew  and  were  known  to  the  aboriginal  habi- 


180    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

tants,  "from  where  the  stunted  Esquimaux  burrowed 
in  their  snow  caves  to  where  the  Comanches  scoured 
the  plains  of  the  south  with  their  banditti  cavalry." 

They  were  a  lawless  lot  whom  this  mission,  not  only 
between  water  and  land  but  also  between  civilization 
and  barbarism,  "spoiled  for  civilization."  But  they 
must  not  be  judged  too  harshly  in  their  vibrations  be- 
tween the  two  standards  of  life  which  they  bridged, 
making  periodical  confession  to  charitable  priests  in 
one,  of  the  sins  committed  in  the  other,  which,  unfor- 
given,  might  have  driven  them  entirely  away  from  the 
church  and  into  perdition. 

The  names  of  most  of  these  coureurs  de  bois  are  for- 
gotten by  history  (which  is  rather  particular  about  the 
character  of  those  whom  it  remembers — other  than 
those  in  kingly  or  other  high  places).  But  they  who 
have  followed  immediately  in  the  trails  of  these  men 
of  the  verges  have  written  these  names,  or  some  of 
them,  in  places  where  they  are  more  widely  read  than 
if  cherished  by  history  even.  Etienne  Brule — who,  as 
interpreter,  led  Le  Caron  out  upon  the  first  western 
mission — after  following  trails  and  waters  for  hundreds 
of  miles  back  of  the  English  settlements,  where  the 
timid  colonists  had  not  dared  to  venture,  suffered  the 
martyrdom  of  fire,  and  is  remembered  in  a  tempestu- 
ous stream  in  the  west  and  perhaps  in  an  Indian  tribe. 
The  name  of  Jean  Nicolet  of  Cherbourg  (the  ambassador 
to  the  Winnebagoes,  from  the  record  of  whose  pic- 
turesque advent  in  the  "Jesuit  Relations"  the  annals 
of  the  west  really  began)  has  been  given  to  a  path 
now  grown  into  one  of  the  most  populous  streets  along 
the  whole  course  of  the  Mississippi  River — in  Min- 
neapolis. 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     181 

And  Du  Lhut,  the  cousin  of  Tonty,  a  native  of  Lyons 
— a  man  of  "persistent  hardihood,  not  surpassed  per- 
haps even  by  La  Salle,"  says  Parkman,  "continually 
in  the  forest,  in  the  Indian  towns,  or  in  the  remote 
wilderness  outposts  planted  by  himself,  exploring, 
trading,  fighting,  ruling  lawless  savages,  and  whites 
scarcely  less  ungovernable,"1  and  crossing  the  ocean 
for  interviews  with  the  colonial  minister,  "amid  the 
splendid  vanities  of  Versailles" — he  is  remembered  for 
all  time  in  that  city,  built  up  against  the  far  shores 
of  Lake  Superior,  bearing  his  name,  Duluth,  the  city 
that  has  taken  the  place  of  London  in  the  list  of  the 
world's  great  harbors.  Macaulay's  vision  of  the  New 
Zealander  standing  amid  the  ruins  of  London  and 
overlooking  the  mastless  Thames  seems  to  have  some 
realization  in  the  succeeding  of  a  city,  founded  in  the 
path  of  a  wood  runner,  out  on  the  borders  of  civiliza- 
tion, to  one  of  London's  distinctions  among  the  cities 
of  the  world. 

"This  class  of  men  is  not  extinct,"  said  Parkman 
twenty  or  thirty  years  ago;  "in  the  cheerless  wilds  be- 
yond the  northern  lakes,  or  among  the  solitudes  of 
the  distant  west  they  may  still  be  found,  unchanged  in 
life  and  character  since  the  day  when  Louis  the  Great 
claimed  sovereignty  over  the  desert  empire." 

But  their  mission,  if  any  survive  till  now,  is  past. 
The  paths,  surveyed  of  the  beasts  and  opened  by  these 
pioneers  to  the  feet  of  priests,  explorers,  and  traders, 
have  let  in  the  influences  that  in  time  destroyed  all 
these  forest  lovers  braved  the  solitude  for.  The 
trace  has  become  the  railroad,  and  the  smell  of  the 
gasolene  motor  is  even  on  the  once  wild  Oregon  trail; 

'Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  274. 


1 82  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

for,  in  general,  it  has  been  said  of  the  forest  part  of 
the  valley,  "where  there  is  a  railway  to-day  there  was 
a  path  a  century  and  a  quarter  ago"  (and  that  means 
longer  ago);  and  it  may  be  added  that  where  there  was 
a  French  trading-post,  or  fort,  or  portage,  there  is  a 
city  to-day,  not  because  of  the  attraction  of  the  popu- 
lations of  those  places  for  the  prospecting  railroad,  but 
because  of  their  natural  highway  advantage,  learned 
even  by  the  buffaloes.  Not  all  paths  have  evolved 
into  railroads,  but  the  railroads  have  followed  prac- 
tically all  of  these  natural  paths — paths  of  the  coureurs 
de  bois,  instinctively  searching  for  mountain  passes, 
the  low  portages  from  valley  to  valley,  the  shortest 
ways  and  the  easiest  grades. 

One  of  America's  greatest  railroad  presidents  has 
noted  this  significant  difference  between  the  railroads 
of  Europe  and  those  of  America,  or  at  any  rate  of  the 
Mississippi  Valley.  In  Europe  they  "took  the  place 
of  the  pack-animal,  the  stage-coach,  the  goods-van  that 
crowded  all  the  highways  between  populous  centers," 
whereas  in  the  Mississippi  Valley  and  beyond  they 
succeeded  the  pioneer  and  pathfinder.  The  railroad 
outran  the  settler  and  "beckoned  him  on,"  just  as  the 
coureur  de  bois  outran  the  slower-going  migrant  and 
beckoned  him  on  to  ever  new  frontiers.  The  buffalo, 
the  coureur  de  bois,  the  engineer  in  turn.  The  rail- 
road, the  more  modern  coureur  de  bois  and  coureur 
de  planche,  has  not  served  the  new-world  society 
merely  as  a  connecting-link  between  communities  al- 
ready developed.    It  has  been  the  "creator  of  cities."1 

Out  on  those  prairies  beyond  the  forests  I  have  seen 
this  general  statement  of  Mr.  Hill's  illustrated.     Down 

1  James  J.  Hill,  "Highways  of  Progress,"  pp.  235,  236. 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     183 

from  Lake  Michigan  the  first  railroad  crept  toward 
the  Mississippi  along  the  Des  Plaines  and  then  the 
Illinois,  where  La  Salle  had  seen  from  his  canoe  great 
herds  of  buffalo  "trampling  by  in  ponderous  columns 
or  filing  in  long  lines  morning,  noon,  and  night."  That 
railroad  was  a  path,  not  to  any  particular  city  but  to 
the  water,  a  path  from  water  to  water,  a  long  portage 
from  the  lake  to  the  Mississippi  and  back  again. 

One  day,  within  my  memory,  a  new  path  was  marked 
by  stakes  that  led  away  from  that  river,  off  across  the 
prairie,  to  an  uninhabited  place  which  the  first  en- 
gineers had  not  known — a  place  of  fire,  the  fields  of 
coal,  of  which  the  practical  Joliet  had  found  signs  on 
his  memorable  journey.  And  so  one  and  another 
road  crossed  that  prairie  (on  which  I  can  even  now 
clearly  see  the  first  engine  standing  in  the  prairie- 
grass),  making  toward  the  places  of  fire,  of  wood,  of 
grain,  of  meat,  of  gold,  of  iron,  of  lead,  till  the  whole 
prairie  was  a  network  of  these  paths — and  now  the 
"transportation  machine"  (as  Mr.  Hill  calls  it)  has 
grown  to  two  hundred  and  fifty-four  thousand  seven 
hundred  and  thirty-two  miles  (in  191 1),  or  about  40 
per  cent  of  the  world  mileage,  of  which  one  hundred 
and  forty  thousand  miles  are  within  the  Mississippi 
Valley,  carrying  with  them  wherever  they  go  the 
telegraph  and  telephone  wires,  building  villages,  towns, 
and  cities — still  bringing  the  fashions  of  Paris,  as  did 
Perrot,  in  the  paths  of  the  buffalo. 

When  the  surveyors  crossed  that  prairie,  treeless 
except  for  the  woods  along  the  Aramoni  River  (just 
back  of  the  Rock  St.  Louis)  and  along  the  Illinois 
River  at  the  other  edge,  the  wild  animals  and  the  In- 
dians had  disappeared  westward,  the  prairie  ground 


1 84    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

was  broken  and  planted  in  patches;  fences  had  begun 
to  appear  on  the  silent  stretches;  houses  stood  four 
to  a  section,  with  a  one-room  schoolhouse  every  two 
miles  and  churches  at  long  intervals.  After  the 
construction  train  ploughed  its  slow  way  across  that 
same  prairie,  in  the  trail  staked  by  the  surveyors,  a 
place  was  marked  for  a  village;  the  farmers  upon  whose 
land  it  promised  to  trespass  wanted  each  to  give  it  the 
name  of  his  wife,  his  queen,  as  La  Salle  of  his  king; 
but  one  day  a  workman,  representing  the  unsentimental 
corporation,  without  ceremony  nailed  a  strip  of  board 
to  a  post,  with  the  name  "  Aramoni,"  let  us  say,  painted 
upon  it.  Wooden  buildings,  stores,  elevators,  black- 
smith, harness,  and  shoemaker  shops,  and  the  dwell- 
ings of  those  who  did  the  work  of  the  little  town, 
gathered  about;  in  time  some  of  the  pioneer  settlers 
leaving  their  farms  to  the  care  of  children  or  tenants 
moved  into  the  town;  the  primitive  stores  were  rebuilt 
in  brick;  houses  of  pretentious  architecture  crowded 
out  of  the  best  sites  the  first  dwellings;  and  in  twenty 
or  thirty  years  it  had  become  a  village  of  several  hun- 
dred people:  retired  farmers  or  their  widows,  men  of 
the  younger  generation  living  on  the  income  of  their 
farms  without  more  than  nominal  occupation,  and 
those  who  buy  the  produce  and  minister  to  the  wants 
of  this  little  community.  Most  of  the  villagers  and 
most  of  the  farmers  in  all  the  country  about  have  the 
telephone  in  their  houses  and  can  talk  as  much  as  they 
please  with  their  neighbors  at  a  very  small  yearly 
charge.  They  also  keep  track  of  the  grain  and  stock 
markets  by  telephone,  have  their  daily  metropolitan 
paper,  a  county  paper,  monthly  magazines  (of  which 
they  are  the  best  readers),  perhaps  a  piano  or  an  organ, 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     185 

more  likely,  now,  a  phonograph,  which  reproduces,  if 
they  choose,  what  is  heard  in  Paris  or  in  concerts  or 
the  grand  opera;  reproductions  of  pieces  of  statuary 
or  paintings  in  the  Louvre;  and  either  a  fast  driving 
horse  or  an  automobile.  They  are  often  within  easy 
reach  of  a  city  by  train,  and  the  wives  or  daughters 
know  the  fashions  of  Paris  and  begin  to  follow  the 
modes  as  quickly  as  local  talent  can  make  the  adap- 
tations and  transformations. 

Aramoni  is  not  an  imaginary  much  less  a  Utopian 
village.  There  are  thousands  of  "Aramonis"  where  the 
railroads  have  gone,  drawing  all  the  physical  conve- 
niences and  social  conventions  after  them,  where  once 
coureurs  de  bois  followed  the  buffaloes. 

Mr.  Hill,  whom  I  have  just  quoted  above,  has  said: 
"Next  after  the  Christian  religion  and  the  public  school 
the  railroad  has  been  the  largest  single  contributing 
factor  to  the  welfare  and  happiness  of  the  people  of 
that  valley."1 

The  first  great  service  of  the  railroads  to  the  re- 
public, as  such,  was  to  make  it  possible  that  the  people 
of  a  territory  three  thousand  miles  wide,  crossed  by 
two  mountain  ranges,  should  be  bound  into  one  re- 
public. The  waters  to  the  east  of  the  Alleghanies  ran 
toward  the  Atlantic,  the  waters  west  of  the  Rockies 
ran  toward  the  Pacific,  and  the  waters  between  the 
mountains  ran  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  If  the  great 
east-and-west  railroads  had  not  been  built  and  some 
of  the  waters  of  the  Lakes  had  not  been  made  to  run 
down  the  Mohawk  Valley  into  the  Hudson  it  is  more 
than  probable  that  there  would  have  been  a  secession 
of  the  men  who  called  themselves  the  "men  of  the 

'James  J.  Hill,  "Highways  of  Progress,"  pp.  236,  237. 


1 86  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

western  waters,"  a  secession  of  the  west  from  the 
east,  rather  than  of  the  south  from  the  north.  If  the 
men  of  this  valley  had  continued  men  of  the  "west- 
ern waters"  there  would  probably  have  been  at  least 
three  republics  in  North  America  and  perhaps  as 
many  as  in  South  America. 

When  Josiah  Quincy,  a  famous  son  of  Massachu- 
setts, said  for  the  men  of  the  east  in  the  halls  of  Con- 
gress, "You  have  no  authority  to  throw  the  rights 
and  liberties  and  property  of  this  people  into  hotch- 
pot with  the  wild  men  on  the  Missouri,  nor  with  the 
mixed  though  more  respectable  race  of  Anglo-Hispano- 
Gallo-Americans,  who  bask  on  the  sands  in  the  mouth 
of  the  Mississippi,"  he  was  visualizing  the  men  whose 
interests  followed  the  rivers  to  another  tide-water 
than  that  of  Boston  and  New  York  harbors.  The 
railroads  made  a  real  prophecy  of  his  fear  that  these 
men  of  the  western  rivers  would  some  day  be  "man- 
aging the  concerns  of  a  seaboard  fifteen  hundred  miles 
from  their  residences,  and  having  a  preponderance  in 
the  councils,"  into  which,  as  he  contended,  "they  should 
never  have  been  admitted."1 

He  was  thinking  and  speaking  rather  of  the  south- 
west than  of  the  northwest,  but  it  was  the  east-and- 
west  lines  of  railroad  that  prevented  the  vital  interest 
of  that  northern  valley  from  flowing  with  the  water 
along  parallels  of  longitude  to  where  the  gulf  cur- 
rents would  catch  its  commerce,  instead  of  over  the 
mountains  along  the  sterner  parallels  of  latitude  and  in 
straighter  course  to  Europe. 

The  force  of  gravity,  the  temptation  of  the  tropics, 

1  Speech  on  the  bill  to  admit  Orleans  Territory  into  the  Union.     Annals  of 
Congress,  nth  Cong.,  3d  Sess.,  1810-n,  pp.  524-542. 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     187 

the  indifference  of  the  east,  the  freedom  from  eastern 
and  puritanical  restraints,  were  all  on  the  side  of  a  "re- 
public of  the  western  waters"  and  against  that  larger, 
continent-wide  nationalism  which  now  has  its  most 
ardent  support  in  that  valley  through  which  the  iron 
shuttles  fly  from  sea  to  sea,  weaving  the  waters  as 
strands  of  color  into  a  unified  pattern  of  sublimer  im- 
port. 

It  looks  now  as  if  the  north-and-south  lines  were 
to  be  strengthened  the  world  over,  as  the  occupied  and 
exploited  north  temperate  zone  reaches  north  toward 
the  frigid  zone,  now  grown  warmer  by  the  very  open- 
ing of  the  lands  to  the  sun  and  the  long  burning  of 
coal,  and  south  toward  the  tropics,  now  made  more 
habitable  by  the  new  knowledge  of  tropical  medicine, 
and  even  across  the  tropics  to  the  sister  temperate  zone 
of  the  southern  hemisphere.1  In  the  Mississippi  Valley, 
the  gulf  ports,  fed  of  river  and  railroad,  are  increas- 
ingly busy,  partly,  to  be  sure,  because  they  look  toward 
the  east-and-west  path  through  Panama,  but  partly, 
too,  because  they  lie  between  the  two  temperate  zones, 
which  must  inevitably  be  brought  nearer  to  each  other. 
We  cannot  imagine  two  permanently  dissociated  or  dis- 
tantly associated  temperate  civilizations  on  this  globe, 
which  is  becoming  smaller  every  day. 

It  was  inevitable,  perhaps,  and  happily  inevitable, 
that  the  east-and-west  lines  should  be  well  established 
before  the  temperate  zone  should  venture  into  tropic 
lotus-lands  again,  and  perhaps  it  was  inevitable  that 

1 1  have  been  told  by  one  who  has  been  studying  conditions  in  the  great 
northwest  fields  of  Canada  that  it  is  now  possible  to  grow  crops  there  that 
could  not  have  been  grown  before  the  country  was  opened  and  cultivated 
to  the  south  of  them,  so  much  longer  have  the  frosts  been  delayed  in  the 
autumn. 


1 88  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  west  should  eventually,  even  without  the  help  of 
steam  and  steel,  attach  itself  to  the  east — even  by 
streams  of  water. 

Washington  had  hardly  put  off  his  uniform,  after  the 
peace  of  1783,  when  he  was  planning  for  a  western 
trip,  and  his  diary  on  the  third  day  of  that  trip  of  six 
hundred  and  eighty  miles  shows  that  his  one  object 
was  to  obtain  information  of  the  nearest  and  best 
communication  between  the  eastern  and  the  western 
waters.  One  of  the  kings  of  France  said,  when  his 
grandson  was  made  king  of  Spain,  "There  are  no  lon- 
ger any  Pyrenees,"  and  Washington,  when  he  saw  the 
new  republic  forming,  said,  in  effect,  "There  must  be 
no  Alleghanies."  He  expected  a  canal  to  erase  the 
mountains,  but  the  railroad  accomplished  this  gigantic 
task  with  but  slight  aid  of  water. 

And  as  the  railroad  tied  the  Mississippi  Valley  to 
the  Atlantic  coast,  so  in  time,  aided  of  a  government 
that  had  every  reason  to  be  grateful,  it  reached  across 
the  uninhabited  plains,  over  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
which  even  the  western  statesmen  said  were  the 
divinely  appointed  barriers,  and  across  the  desert 
beyond  to  the  Pacific  slope  and  tied  it  to  a  capital 
which  is  now  nearer  to  San  Francisco  than  once  it 
was  to  Boston.  A  man  from  Missouri  is  speaker  of 
the  house  in  which  Josiah  Quincy  spoke  his  provincial 
fears.  A  man  from  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi,  the 
highest  authority  in  America  on  the  French  code,  was 
but  a  little  time  ago  appointed  as  the  chief  justice  of 
the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  by  a  Presi- 
dent who  was  born  on  the  banks  of  the  Ohio;  that  is, 
the  highest  office  in  each  of  the  three  independent 
branches  of  government  (the  executive,  the  legislative, 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     189 

and  the  judicial)  have  at  one  time  been  filled  by  men 
of  the  western  waters.  I  am  anticipating  a  fact  that 
belongs  to  a  later  theme,  but  there  is  no  single  fact  that 
can  better  illustrate  the  political  service  of  the  paths 
over  which  we  are  to-day  travelling. 

On  the  economic  consequences  we  need  not  now 
dwell.  They  have  had  too  frequent  and  sufficiently 
conspicuous  illustration  in  every  foreign  mind  that 
knows  anything  whatever  of  that  valley  to  make  it 
necessary  to  insist  in  this  cursory  view  upon  their 
great  contribution  to  physical  comfort.  It  is,  how- 
ever, begun  to  be  felt  that  in  the  rapid  development 
and  exploitation  of  the  resources  of  that  valley  (made 
possible  only  by  the  railroads)  the  future  has  not  been 
enough  in  our  minds.  It  was  said  a  few  years  ago 
that  there  was  not  money  enough  in  the  world  to  lay 
track  to  take  the  traffic  that  the  Mississippi  Basin 
offered.  The  valley  wanted  to  get  everything  to  mar- 
ket in  one  generation,  indifferent  to  the  fate  of  those 
who  should  come  after — the  passes  through  the  moun- 
tains being  choked  by  cars  carrying  to  the  coasts  crops 
from  increasing  acreage  of  declining  productivity  or 
the  products  of  swiftly  disappearing  forests  or  the  out- 
put of  mines  that  must  soon  be  exhausted. 

Perhaps  the  railroads  are  not  to  be  blamed  for  this 
decrease  in  productivity — a  passing  phase  of  our  agri- 
cultural life,  as  recent  crop  reports  show.  They  are 
very  loudly  blamed  that  they  do  not  carry  these  prod- 
ucts fast  enough  or  cheaply  enough,  though,  accord- 
ing to  a  recent  authority,  their  rates  are  less  on  the 
average  than  the  cost  of  the  French  water  traffic. 

Nevertheless,  their  wheels  alone  have  made  possible 
that  phenomenal  draining  of  the  riches  of  the  land  to 


190    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  coasts  and  other  shores,  assisting  the  waters  that 
carry  a  half-billion  tons  of  soil  into  the  gulf  every  year. 
Perhaps  this  hurried,  panting  development  has  been 
for  the  good  of  all  time,  but  until  recently  there  has 
been  little  or  no  thought  of  that  "all  time"  (as  we 
observed  in  the  policies  of  land  parcelling). 

Practically  the  whole  western  country  has  tied  itself 
to  a  wheel,  and  so  whatever  its  happiness  and  welfare 
may  be,  come  of  or  with  the  wheel.  This  territory  is 
capable  of  self-support;  it  has  still  its  independent 
spirit,  bred  of  the  pioneer  who  lived  before  the  day  of 
wheels;  it  is  responsive  to  appeals  that  stop  its  rest- 
less movement — as  the  wheel  of  Ixion  when  Orpheus 
played;  but  none  the  less  is  it  an  eager,  restless,  un- 
quiet life,  driven  as  a  wheel,  driven  by  the  same  hand 
that  urged  it  into  the  valley. 

No  one  asks — or  few  ask — if  the  wheel  brings  good 
or  ill.  The  only  concern  is  that  it  shall  run  as  quickly 
and  safely  as  is  humanly  and  mechanically  possible 
and  shall  not  discriminate  between  one  shipper  and 
another,  one  community  and  another,  one  consumer 
and  another.  That  is  the  railroad  problem.  The 
wheel  has  removed  watersheds  at  pleasure,  created 
cities  and  fortunes  by  its  presence  or  its  taking  thought. 
But  under  the  new  policy  of  the  government  it  is  not 
likely  that  there  will  ever  again  be  such  ruthless  dis- 
turbance of  nature,  or  such  wild,  profuse  creation. 
Democracy,  beginning  in  that  valley,  is  seeking  now  a 
perfect  impersonal  transportation  machine. 

But  such  a  machine  will  drain  quite  as  effectively 
the  country  districts.  The  census  returns  for  1910 
show,  for  example,  that  in  one  prosperous  agricultural 
State,  Missouri,  just  west  of  the  Mississippi,  while  the 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     191 

State  as  a  whole  showed  an  increase  of  187,00x3  in  ten 
years,  there  was  a  net  decrease  of  84,000  in  the  rural 
districts.  A  partial  explanation  of  the  latter  statistic 
is  the  moving  on  of  farmers  to  still  newer  lands;  an- 
other, the  decline  in  the  size  of  families;  but  it  is  at- 
tributable chiefly  to  the  first  statistic,  the  drift  to  the 
city — and  to  this  the  wheels  contribute  more  than  any 
other  influence,  carrying,  as  they  do,  the  glamour  or 
the  opportunity  of  the  city  life  daily  before  the  eyes  of 
the  country  boy. 

To  be  sure,  these  same  wheels  are  lessening,  to  some 
extent,  the  congestion  of  the  great  centres  of  popula- 
tion, and  lightening  their  shadows  by  extending  them 
— spreading  them — but  none  the  less  are  the  shadows 
spreading  faster  from  the  coming  of  the  country  to  the 
city  than  of  the  suburbanizing  of  the  city. 

This  movement  is  not  peculiar  to  the  Mississippi 
Valley,  but  it  is  more  rapid  there,  perhaps,  than  in  any 
other  great  area. 

Let  me  give  you  an  illustration  of  that  demigrating 
influence.  Two  years  ago  I  invited  several  leaders  of 
great  transportation  and  educational  interests  in  New 
York  to  meet  one  of  their  number  who,  beginning  life 
as  a  telegraph  operator  out  beyond  the  Mississippi, 
was  at  the  head  of  one  of  the  two  greatest  railroads  in 
the  east.  Of  the  guests,  one,  the  president  of  another 
important  railroad,  was  once  a  farm  boy,  then  a  freight 
brakeman  in  that  same  western  State;  another,  the 
president  of  one  of  the  longest  railroads,  was  the  son 
of  a  stone-mason  out  in  that  valley;  another,  the  head 
of  the  Interborough  system  of  New  York,  also  a  prairie- 
born  boy;  another,  president  of  the  greatest  southern 
railroad,  was  born  at  the  mouth  of  the  Mississippi; 


192     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

and  still  another,  one  of  the  wealthiest  men  in  the 
world,  was  at  one  time  a  messenger  boy  and  tele- 
graph operator  just  over  the  mountains  on  the  site 
of  Fort  Duquesne.  Only  one  man  of  the  company  of 
nearly  twenty  men,  assembled  without  thought  of 
origin,  had  been  born  in  New  York.  All  had  come 
from  the  country  or  from  across  the  water,  and  most 
of  them  from  the  great  Mississippi  Valley.  I  speak 
of  this  while  discussing  the  railroad,  because  it  is  their 
paths  through  the  valley  of  the  French  that  have  made 
this  phenomenon  possible. 

I  have  spoken  of  what  the  wheel  has  done  in  making 
the  permanence  of  one  republic  of  such  an  area  a  pos- 
sibility. Nothing  save  a  loose,  heterogeneous  confeder- 
ation could  have  been  practicable  without  its  unifying 
service.  It  is  only  fair  to  those  who  made  such  gloomy 
prophecies  in  the  early  days  to  say  that  they  had  no 
intimation  of  what  steam  was  destined  to  do.  When 
Robert  Fulton,  the  inventor  of  the  steamboat,  early  in 
the  nineteenth  century,  on  a  journey  back  from  the 
west  in  a  stage-coach,  said  that  some  day  steam  would 
drive  wagons  faster  than  they  were  going  in  the  coach, 
his  fellow  passengers  thought  him  a  dreamer — a  vision- 
ary. But  it  was  only  a  man  of  such  dreams  or  visions 
who  in  those  days  could  have  seen  the  possibility 
which  has  to-day  been  realized  through  the  railroad. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  part  which  the  steam  wheel  has 
had  in  the  rapid  development  and  the  exploitation  of 
that  great  valley  which,  except  for  its  pioneering  in 
wild  places,  might  have  been  seven  hundred  years,  as 
Andrew  Johnson  predicted,  in  rilling  up,  or  at  least 
two  or  three  centuries. 

I  have  intimated  its  influence  in  promoting  migra- 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE   BOIS     193 

tion  cityward — a  movement  as  wide  as  European  civ- 
ilization— but  intensified  there,  where  the  inhabitants 
have  not  been  tied  through  generations  of  inheritance 
or  historic  associations  to  particular  fields,  where  primo- 
geniture has  no  observance,  and  where  the  traditions 
are  of  the  wilderness  and  the  visions  are  ever  of  a 
promised  land  beyond.  The  city  is  on  every  boy's 
horizon.    Its  glow  is  in  every  prairie  sky  at  twilight. 

When  a  boy  on  those  silent  plains  I  had  my  Horace 
and  my  Euripides  in  the  field.  The  unattainable 
eternal  cities  lent  their  charm  and  glory  to  the  valley 
whose  childhood  horizon  I  had  not  crossed.  But  now 
no  country  boy  thinks  of  the  ancient  or  the  mediaeval. 
It  is  the  nearer  city  and  civilization  that  impress  the 
imagination.  The  valedictorian  of  a  class,  graduat- 
ing as  I  entered  college,  told  me  a  few  months  ago 
that  he  was  building  a  trolley-line  in  Rome,  and  that, 
after  all,  Falernian  wine,  of  which  we  who  had  never 
tasted  wine  out  in  that  vineless  region  thought  as  some 
drink  of  the  gods,  was  very  bitter. 

I  have  hinted  at  what  the  wheel  has  done,  in  what  it 
carries,  to  make  all  look  alike  and  think  alike  and  act 
alike,  but  there  is  one  supreme  service  that  must  have 
mention.  In  that  country  when  travel  was  slow  we 
had  a  representative  government.  But  while  we  still 
have  the  same  form,  the  wheel  has  made  possible,  and 
so  necessary,  a  more  democratic  government.  When  a 
representative  was  weeks  in  reaching  the  capital  he 
acted  on  his  own  responsibility  in  larger  measure  than 
now,  when  his  constituency  can  reach  him  every  morn- 
ing. The  valley  is  reached  every  day,  just  as  the 
people  in  a  pure  democracy  were  reached  by  the  an- 
cient stentor.     The  people  are  reserving  to  themselves 


194    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

more  and  more  of  the  function  of  their  one-time  rep- 
resentatives, in  such  measures  as  the  referendum 
and  initiative  intimate,  and  are  trying  to  secure  more 
accurate  representation  in  such  systems  as  the  direct 
primary  and  proportional  representation  suggest;  but 
these  all  are  possible  only  through  the  aid  of  the  wheel 
and  of  what  it  has  brought.  If  the  improvement  of 
democracy  is  to  come  through  more  democracy,  as 
some  think,  then  the  railroad  is  an  essential  agent  of 
political  progress  as  well  as  of  economic  exploitation 
and  social  homogeneity.  I  am  not  discussing  this 
thesis  but  simply  showing  how  dependent  upon  this 
physical  agent  is  the  machinery  of  democracy. 

Moreover,  mobility  is  almost  an  essential  quality 
of  the  spirit  of  democracy,  the  free  way  to  the  farthest 
horizons,  the  open  road  to  the  highest  position  and 
service.  When  the  atom  becomes  practically  fixed  by 
its  environment,  reposeful  and  stable,  stratification 
sets  in.  We  may  or  we  may  not  have  then  something 
better. 

It  may  seem  to  you  a  far  cry  from  those  rough,  law- 
less coureurs  de  bois  to  the  mobile  but  orderly  people 
of  that  valley  to-day.  But  after  an  experience  of  a 
few  summers  ago  the  distance  does  not  seem  so  great. 

Here  is  a  journal  of  three  days: 

In  the  morning  of  an  August  day  I  was  gathering 
some  last  data  from  the  library  of  one  of  the  greatest, 
though  one  of  the  newest,  universities  in  the  world 
— a  two-hours'  journey  from  where  the  coureur  de  bois 
Jean  Nicolet,  in  robe  of  damask,  first  looked  over  the 
edge  of  the  basin.  (Not  many  years  ago  I  sat  there  in 
an  assembly  of  learned  men  gathered  from  the  ends  of 
the  earth  and  arrayed  in  academic  robes.)    In  the  after- 


TRAILS  OF  THE  COUREURS  DE  BOIS     195 

noon  I  walked  over  that  first  and  most  famous  of  the 
French  portages,  but  not  content  with  that,  I  walked 
on  into  the  night  along  the  Wisconsin,  that  I  might 
see  the  river  as  the  explorers  saw  it.  However,  at  mid- 
night I  took  a  palace  car,  with  such  conveniences  as 
even  Louis  the  Great  did  not  have  at  Versailles,  and 
woke  well  up  the  Mississippi.  I  spent  the  day  at 
another  great  State  university  and  at  dusk  set  off  by 
the  actual  trails  of  the  French  coureurs  de  bois  (only 
by  wheels  instead  of  on  foot),  first  through  the  woods 
and  along  rivers,  above  Green  Bay  to  the  "Soo,"  then 
above  Lake  Huron  and  the  Nipissing  and  down  the 
Ottawa  River,  where  I  saw  the  second  day  break,  and 
then  on  past  La  Salle's  seigniory  of  St.  Sulpice,  around 
Cartier's  mountain  into  Montreal,  and  thence  to  the 
Rock  of  Quebec. 

It  is  a  common,  unimaginative  metaphor  in  the 
United  States  to  call  the  engine  which  leads  the  mighty 
trains  across  the  country  the  iron  horse;  but  it  is  de- 
serving of  a  nobler  figure.  It  is  the  iron  coureur  de 
bois,  still  leading  Europe  into  America,  and  America 
into  a  newer  America. 


CHAPTER  X 
IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN" 

IN  the  lower  St.  Lawrence  Valley,  among  the 
French  Canadians,  where  France  is  best  remem- 
bered and  where  the  shut-in  life  is  not  disturbed 
by  current  events  or  changing  conventions  or  evanes- 
cent fashions,  I  am  told  there  are  traces  in  their  lan- 
guage of  the  sea  life  of  their  ancestors  on  the  coasts 
of  Brittany  and  Normandy.  When,  for  example,  a 
neighbor  approaches  a  farmhouse  on  horseback  he 
is  asked  not  to  "alight"  or  to  "dismount"  but  to 
"disembark,"  and  he  is  invited  not  to  "tie"  his  horse 
but  to  "moor"  it.  It  is  as  if  they  were  still  crying 
ever  in  their  unconscious  memories,  "Thalassa,  Tha- 
lassa";  as  if  the  very  shells  of  speech  still  carried  the 
roar  of  the  ocean  which  they  who  hold  them  to  their 
ears  have  never  seen. 

If  the  language  of  the  upper  valley  of  the  St.  Law- 
rence and  of  the  valley  of  the  Mississippi  remembered 
as  distinctly  its  origin  we  should  everywhere  hear  the 
plash  of  the  oar  in  all  the  hospitality  of  their  settle- 
ments. But  all  such  traces  have  disappeared,  or  all 
but  disappeared,  in  the  Mississippi  Valley.  The  only 
one  that  comes  to  me  now,  as  possibly  of  the  old  French 
days,  is  one  which  is  preserved  in  an  adage  not  at  all 
French  but  quite  characteristic  of  the  independent 
life  that  has  occupied   the  banks  of  all  the  rivers: 

196 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"  197 
• 
"Paddle  your  own  canoe."  Yet  even  in  the  space  of 
one  or  two  generations  of  agricultural  life  that,  too,  is 
disappearing,  supplanted  by  a  synonymous  phrase, 
borrowed  of  fields  that  have  entirely  forgotten  the 
primitive  days,  when  men  travelled  only  by  water  and 
lived  near  the  streams:  "Hoe  your  own  row." 

The  first  sound  of  the  overmountain  migration  of 
which  I  spoke  above  was  of  the  stealthy  step  of  the 
hunter,  yet  back  of  that  for  a  century  was  the  scarcely 
audible  plash  of  the  paddle  and  the  answering  swirl 
of  the  water.  But  as  in  overmountain  migration  the 
noisy  wheel  soon  followed  the  foot,  so  in  the  other  the 
noiseless  sail  followed  the  swishing  paddle. 

The  city  of  Paris  bears  a  sailing  ship  upon  her  shield, 
though  she  sits  a  hundred  miles  or  more  from  the  sea. 
Whatever  the  significance  of  that  symbol  has  been 
to  the  people  of  France,  it  has  a  peculiar  appropriate- 
ness (probably  never  realized  before)  in  the  fact  that 
the  iron,  cordage,  and  anchors  for  the  first  vessel 
which  sailed  upon  the  inland  waters  of  the  new  world 
were  carried  out  from  France  to  the  first  shipyard, 
beyond  the  mountains,  in  the  midst  of  the  forest,  above 
the  mighty  Falls  of  Niagara. 

Jason  of  Thessaly,  sailing  for  the  Golden  Fleece  in 
Colchis,  and  braving  the  fiery  breath  of  the  dragon, 
did  not  undertake  a  more  perilous  or  more  difficult 
labor  than  he  who  bore  from  the  banks  of  the  Seine 
the  equipment  of  a  vessel  in  which  to  bring  back  to 
France,  as  he  hoped,  the  fleece  of  the  forest  and  the 
plain. 

We  are  accustomed  to  call  those  who  crossed  the 
plains  and  the  Rocky  Mountains  for  the  gold-fields  of 
California  nearly  two  centuries   later   (in   1849)   the 


198     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Argonautae;  but  the  first  American  Argonauts  went 
from  France,  and  they  built  their  Argo  on  what  is 
now  Lake  Erie,  on  the  edge  of  the  Field  of  the  Bulls, 
near  a  place,  grown  into  a  beautiful  city,  which  now 
bears  the  very  name  of  the  wild  bull,  the  "buffalo," 
and  within  sound  of  the  roaring  of  the  dragon  that  had 
frightened  all  earlier  explorers.  So  accurately  do  the 
details  of  the  story  of  Jason's  adventure  become  real- 
ities to-day!  Champlain  and  others  had  heard  only 
at  a  distance  the  thunder  of  the  great  cataract  that 
was  some  day  to  become  not  only  as  docile  as  the 
dragon  under  Jason's  taming  but  as  useful  as  a  million 
harnessed  bulls. 

La  Salle  gathered  his  ship-carpenters  and  his  ship 
furniture  between  his  journeys  to  Rouen  (the  place  of 
his  birth)  and  elsewhere  for  the  means  of  purchase. 
But  before  the  winter  had  come  in  Normandy  his  mes- 
sengers were  out  amid  the  snows  and  naked  forests  of 
Canadian  winters  in  continuance  of  that  voyage  toward 
the  western  Colchis. 

In  the  autumn  of  1678  a  Franciscan  friar,  Hennepin, 
set  out  with  two  canoemen,  the  first  solitary  figures  of 
the  expedition — a  gray  priest  from  the  gray  Rock  of 
Quebec,  in  a  birch  canoe,  carrying  with  him  the  "fur- 
niture of  a  portable  altar" — a  priest  who  professed  a 
zeal  for  souls,  but  who  admitted  a  passion  for  travel 
and  a  burning  desire  to  visit  strange  lands.  He  re- 
lates of  himself  that,  being  sent  from  a  convent  in 
Artois  to  Calais  at  the  season  of  herring  fishing,  he 
made  friends  of  the  sailors  and  never  tired  of  their 
stories.  "Often,"  he  says,  "I  hid  myself  behind 
tavern  doors  while  the  sailors  were  telling  of  their 
voyages.     The  tobacco  smoke  made  me  very  sick  at 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       199 

the  stomach,  but  nevertheless  I  listened  attentively. 
...  I  could  have  passed  whole  days  and  nights  in 
this  way  without  eating."1 

Along  the  way  up  the  St.  Lawrence  he  stopped  to 
minister  to  the  habitants — too  few  and  too  poor  to 
support  a  priest — saying  mass,  exhorting,  and  baptiz- 
ing. Early  in  November  he  arrived  at  the  mission  of 
Fort  Frontenac,  which  he  had  two  or  three  years  be- 
fore helped  to  establish  in  the  wilds.  Soon  La  Salle's 
lieutenants,  La  Motte  and  Tonty,  appeared  with  most 
of  the  men,  and  while  some  were  despatched  in  canoes 
to  Lake  Michigan  to  gather  the  buffalo-hides  and 
beaver-skins  against  the  coming  of  the  ship,  whose 
keel  had  not  yet  been  laid,  the  rest  (La  Motte,  Henne- 
pin, and  sixteen  men)  embarked  for  the  Niagara  River, 
by  which  the  upper  lakes  empty  into  Lake  Ontario 
and  the  St.  Lawrence.  After  a  tempestuous  voyage 
up  and  across  the  lake  they  reached  this  river,  whose 
torrent  fury,  gathered  of  "four  inland  oceans,"  stopped 
even  the  canoes.  Then,  led  of  the  priest,  they  toiled 
up  the  cliffs  called  the  "Three  Mountains,"  because,  I 
suppose,  of  the  three  terraces.  (Having  climbed  up 
the  face  of  the  cliffs  in  winter,  with  a  heavy  camera 
for  my  portable  altar,  and  having  broken  the  great 
icicles  formed  by  the  trickling  stream  over  one  of  the 
terraces,  in  order  to  make  my  way  across  a  narrow 
ledge  to  the  top  of  the  precipice,  I  am  able  to  know 
what  the  journey  must  have  meant  to  those  first 
European  travellers.)  Once  upon  the  upper  plateau, 
they  marched  through  the  wintry  forest  and  at  length, 
in  "solitude  unprofaned  as  yet  by  the  pettiness  of 

1  Parkman,  "La  Salle,"  p.  133.    Hennepin,  "A  New  Discovery  of  a 
Large  Country  in  America,"  ed.  Thwaites,  I  :  30. 


200  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

man,"  they  beheld  the  "imperial  cataract" — the 
"thunder  of  water,"  as  the  Indians  called  it — or,  as 
Hennepin  described  it,  that  "vast  and  prodigious 
cadence  of  water  which  falls  down  after  a  surprising 
and  most  astonishing  manner,  insomuch  that  the  uni- 
verse does  not  afford  its  parallel,  those  of  Italy  and 
Switzerland  being  but  sorry  patterns."  To  this  priest, 
Hennepin,  we  owe  the  first  description  and  picture  of 
Niagara,1  probably  now  more  familiar  to  the  world 
than  any  other  natural  feature  of  this  continent.  He 
has  somewhat  magnified  the  height  of  these  falls, 
making  it  five  hundred  feet  in  the  edition  of  1683,  and 
raising  it  to  six  hundred  in  1697;  but  they  are  impres- 
sive enough  to  acquit  him  of  intentional  falsification 
and  powerful  enough  to  run  virtually  all  the  manu- 
facturing plants  in  the  United  States,  if  they  could  be 
gathered  within  its  easy  reach. 

As  it  is,  less  than  9  per  cent  of  the  water  that  over- 
flows from  the  four  upper  Great  Lakes  into  the  lower 
lake,  once  known  as  Lake  Frontenac  and  now  as  On- 
tario, is  diverted  for  utilitarian  purposes;  it  supplies 
the  Americans  and  the  Canadians  almost  equally  be- 
tween the  two  shores  five  hundred  thousand  horse- 


1  "Four  leagues  from  Lake  Frontenac  there  is  an  incredible  Cataract  or 
Waterfall,  which  has  no  equal.  The  Niagara  river  near  this  place  is  only 
the  eighth  of  a  league  wide,  but  it  is  very  deep  in  places,  and  so  rapid  above 
the  great  fall  that  it  hurries  down  all  the  animals  which  try  to  cross  it, 
without  a  single  one  being  able  to  withstand  its  current.  They  plunge 
down  a  height  of  more  than  five  hundred  feet,  and  its  fall  is  composed  of 
two  sheets  of  water  and  a  cascade,  with  an  island  sloping  down.  In  the 
middle  these  waters  foam  and  boil  in  a  fearful  manner. 

"They  thunder  continually,  and  when  the  wind  blows  in  a  southerly 
direction  the  noise  which  they  make  is  heard  for  more  than  fifteen  leagues. 
Four  leagues  from  this  cataract,  or  fall,  the  Niagara  river  rushes  with  extraor- 
dinary rapidity  especially  for  two  leagues  into  Lake  Frontenac." — Hennepin, 
"Description  of  Louisiana,"  pp.  71-73. 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       201 

power.1  What  the  conversion  of  the  strength  of  this 
Titan  (for  ages  entirely  wasted  and  for  a  century  after 
Hennepin  only  a  scenic  wonder)  means,  or  may  mean, 
to  industry  in  the  future  is  intimated  in  some  statistics, 
furnished  by  a  recent  writer  on  the  Great  Lakes,  show- 
ing the  relative  cost  per  month  of  a  certain  unit  of 
power  in  a  number  of  representative  American  cities.2 

Boston #937-50 

Philadelphia 839.25 

New  York 699.37 

Chicago 629.43 

Cleveland 559-5° 

Pittsburgh 419.62 

Buffalo 184.91 

Niagara  Falls I44J7 

These  figures  are  more  significant  as  one  contem- 
plates the  diminishing  supply  of  coal  in  coming  cen- 
turies, if  not  decades.  According  to  the  estimate  of  a 
reliable  authority  the  available  and  accessible  coal  sup- 

1  "Under  a  treaty  between  the  United  States  and  the  British  Govern- 
ment only  about  25  per  cent  of  the  theoretical  horsepower  of  Niagara  Falls 
can  be  developed.  The  estimate  of  the  minimum  amount  of  power  that 
can  be  developed  on  the  Niagara  River  above  and  including  the  Falls  is 
5,800,000  h.p.,  and  the  assumed  maximum  is  6,500,000  h.p.  The  treaty, 
therefore,  limits  present  possible  minimum  development  on  both  sides  of 
the  Falls  to  1,450,000  h.p.  Under  the  treaty  only  five- fourteenths  of  the 
power  made  available  thereby  belongs  to  the  United  States,  its  share  being 
reduced  by  the  diversion  of  water  from  Lake  Michigan  into  the  Drainage 
Canal  at  Chicago.  There  is  thus  left  at  Niagara  Falls  only  about  518,000 
h.p.  that  can  at  present  be  developed  on  the  American  side."  About  one- 
half  of  this  total  is  now  developed. — United  States  Commissioner  of  Corpo- 
rations.   Report  on  water-power  development  in  the  United  States.     191 2. 

2  "Assuming  the  maximum  power  used  to  be  one  hundred  horse-power, 
the  number  of  working  hours  a  day  to  be  ten,  and  the  'load  factor,'  or 
average  power  actually  used,  to  be  seventy-five  per  cent  of  the  total  one 
hundred,  the  cost  per  month  in  the  cities  named  is  as  [above]." — Curwood, 
"The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  135. 


202    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

ply  of  the  United  States  will  be  exhausted  at  the  pres- 
ent rate  of  exploitation  by  the  year  2027,  and  the 
entire  supply  by  the  year  2050. 

Such  statistics  intimate  the  advantage  possessed,  per- 
haps beyond  any  other  site  in  America,  by  the  strip 
of  shore  on  which  La  Salle's  men,  from  the  banks  of 
the  Seine,  and  Hennepin,  the  priest  from  Calais,  that 
December  night  in  1678  encamped,  building  their 
bivouac  fires  amid  the  snows,  three  miles  above  the 
falls — and  so  opening  to  the  view  of  the  world  a  nat- 
ural source  of  power  and  wealth  more  valuable  than 
extensive  coal-fields  or  rich  mines  of  gold  or  silver. 

It  was  but  a  great  waterfall  to  La  Salle  and  Tonty 
and  Hennepin — an  impeding,  noisy,  hostile  object. 
And  to  the  half-mutinous,  quarrelsome  workmen 
(French,  Flemings,  Italians)  it  was  a  demon,  no  doubt, 
whose  very  breath  froze  their  beards  into  icicles.  It 
was,  in  reality,  potentially  the  most  beneficent  single, 
incarnate  force  bounded  by  any  one  horizon  of  sky, 
in  that  new  world,  developed  by  the  tipping  of  the 
continent  a  little  to  the  eastward  after  the  upper  lakes 
had  been  formed  and  the  consequent  emptying  of  their 
waters  into  the  St.  Lawrence  instead  of  the  Gulf  of 
Mexico. 

In  January,  1679,  a  n^e  °f  burdened  men,  some 
thirty  in  number,  toiling  slowly  on  their  way  over  the 
snowy  plains  and  "through  the  gloomy  forests  of 
spruce  and  naked  oak  trees,"  the  priest  accompany- 
ing with  his  altar  lashed  to  his  back,  reached  a  favor- 
able spot  beside  calm  water  several  miles  above  the 
cataract:  the  site  is  identified  as  situate  a  little  way 
above  the  mouth  of  Cayuga  Creek,  just  outside  the 
village  of  La  Salle,  in  the  State  of  New  York.    There 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       203 

is  a  stone  erected  by  the  local  historical  society  to 
mark  the  spot.  When  I  saw  the  bronze  tablet  the 
inscription  was  almost  illegible,  covered,  as  it  was,  with 
ice  and  the  snow  that  was  at  that  very  hour  falling 
upon  it. 

There,  began  the  felling  and  hewing  of  trees  that  were 
to  touch  the  farther  shores  of  Michigan.  The  supplies 
brought  out  from  Paris  had  been  lost  by  the  wreck  of 
La  Salle's  smaller  vessel  on  the  way  up  Ontario,  but 
enough  was  saved,  or  brought  by  La  Salle  on  his  re- 
turn from  Fort  Frontenac,  to  give  this  sixty-ton  vessel 
full  equipment,  for  in  the  spring  she  was  launched. 
The  "friar  pronounced  his  blessing  on  her;  the  as- 
sembled company  sang  Te  Deum;  cannon  were  fired; 
and  French  and  Indians  .  .  .  shouted  and  yelped  in 
chorus  as  she  glided  into  Niagara."  She  carried  five 
cannon  and  on  her  prow  was  carved  such  a  "portentous 
monster"  as  doubtless  is  to  be  found  among  the  gro- 
tesques of  Notre  Dame — a  griffin  (that  is,  a  beast  with 
the  body  of  a  lion  and  the  head,  beak,  and  pinions  of 
a  bird),  in  honor  of  the  armorial  bearings  of  Count 
Frontenac. 

Through  spring  and  half  the  summer  the  vessel  lay 
moored  beyond  reach  of  the  Indians  but  near  enough 
so  that  Hennepin  "could  preach  on  Sundays  from  the 
deck  to  the  men  encamped  along  the  bank."  When 
La  Salle,  who  had  been  obliged  by  disasters  to  go  back 
to  Fort  Frontenac  during  the  building  of  the  ship, 
again  appeared  above  the  falls  in  midsummer,  the 
Griffin  was  warped  up  into  the  placid  lake,  and  on  the 
7th  of  August  anchor  was  lifted  and  the  fateful  voyage 
was  begun. 

There  was  (as  when  the  Argo,  the  "first  bold  vessel, 


204    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

dared  the  seas")  no  Orpheus  standing  "high  on  the 
stern"  and  "raising  his  entrancing  strain."  Nor  did 
a  throng  of  proud  Thessalians  or  of  "transported  demi- 
gods" stand  round  to  cheer  them  off.  The  naked  In- 
dians, their  hands  over  their  mouths  in  wonderment 
or  shouting,  "Gannorom  !  Gannorom  !"  alone  saw  the 
great  boat  move  out  over  the  waters  without  oar  or 
paddle  or  towing  rope.  For  music  there  was  only  the 
Te  Deum  again,  sung  by  raw,  unpractised  voices,  such 
as  one  might  hear  among  the  boatmen  of  the  Seine. 
It  was  not  such  music,  at  any  rate,  as  that  of  Orpheus, 
to  make  plain  men  grow  "heroes  at  the  sound." 
Doubtless  no  one  felt  himself  a  hero.  The  only  in- 
timation of  any  consciousness  of  a  high  mission  comes 
from  Hennepin,  who,  when  the  Griffin,  some  days 
later,  was  ploughing  peacefully  through  the  straits  that 
led  to  the  Mer  Douce — "verdant  prairies,  dotted  with 
groves  and  bordered  with  lofty  forests"  on  either  side, 
"herds  of  deer  and  flocks  of  swans  and  wild  turkeys" 
within  sight,  and  the  "bulwarks  plentifully  hung  with 
game" — wrote:  "Those  who  will  one  day  have  the 
happiness  to  possess  this  fertile  and  pleasant  strait, 
will  be  very  much  obliged  to  those  who  have  shown 
them  the  way." 

"Very  much  obliged"?  No,  Hennepin!  Of  the 
hundreds  of  thousands  who  now  pass  through  or  across 
those  straits  every  year,  or  of  those  thousands  who 
possess  its  shores,  not  a  hundred,  I  venture  to  say,  re- 
member "those  who  showed  the  way"  !  They  have 
even  forgotten  "that  the  first  European  voice  that 
Niagara  ever  heard  was  French"!  Ste.  Claire! — the 
name  you  gave  to  the  beautiful  strait  beyond  the 
"Symplegades"  of  your  voyage,  in  gratitude  and  in 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       205 

honor  of  the  day  on  which  your  company  reached  it — 
has  become  masculine  in  tribute  to  an  American  gen- 
eral. If  your  later  praying  to  that  patron  of  seamen, 
St.  Anthony  of  Padua,  had  not  availed  to  save  you 
from  the  peril  of  the  storm  and  you  had  gone  to  death 
in  unsalted  water,  you  could  hardly  have  been  more 
completely  forgotten.  One  has  spoken  now  and  then 
lightly  of  the  vow  made  by  your  commander,  La  Salle, 
to  build  a  grateful  chapel  to  St.  Anthony  if  your  lives 
were  saved  during  that  storm,  forgetting  that  so  long 
as  the  Mississippi  runs  to  the  sea  there  will  be  a  chapel 
to  St.  Anthony  (St.  Anthony's  Falls)  in  which  grati- 
tude will  be  continually  chanted  through  ages  for  the 
preservation  of  the  ship  and  its  crew  to  find  haven  in 
quiet  waters  behind  Point  St.  Ignace. 

It  was  there,  at  St.  Ignace  that  we  have  seen  La 
Salle,  in  scarlet,  kneeling  before  the  altar,  where  Mar- 
quette's bones  were  doubtless  by  that  time  gathered 
by  his  devoted  savage  followers,  and  it  was  thence  that 
they  passed  on  to  an  island  in  Green  Bay,  the  goal  of 
their  journey. 

From  that  far  port  the  first  cargo  carried  of  sails 
was  sent  out,  bound  for  the  shore  on  which  the  Griffin  s 
timbers  had  been  hewn.  That  it  never  reached  harbor 
of  that  calm  shelter,  or  any  other,  we  know;  but  that 
loss,  once  the  path  was  traced  in  the  waters,  is  hardly 
of  consequence  save  as  it  helped  further  to  illustrate 
the  indomitable  spirit  of  La  Salle  and  his  companions. 

What  good  came  to  Thessaly  or  Greece  of  the  yellow 
peltry  that  Jason  brought  back  is  not  even  kept  in 
myth  or  fable.  The  mere  adventure  was  the  all. 
They  did  not  even  think  of  its  worth.  The  goatskin 
was   valueless   except   as   a   proof  or  token,   and   the 


206    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

boat  Argo,  though  the  greatest  ship  known  to  the 
early  myths  of  Greece,  and  though  dedicated,  we  are 
told,  to  Neptune  at  the  end  of  the  voyage,  became  the 
pioneer  of  no  such  mighty  fleet  as  did  the  Griffin.  The 
list  of  the  Greek  ships  and  commanders  in  the  Iliad 
offers  but  a  pygmy  analogy.  And  if  you  were  to  go  to 
Buffalo  to-day,  near  the  site  of  that  first  shipyard  (a 
little  farther  away  from  the  falls),  you  would  know  that 
the  successors  of  La  Salle  in  new  Griffins  had  actually 
brought  back  the  golden  fleece — the  priceless  fleece, 
the  fleece  of  the  plains  if  not  of  the  forests.  Day  after 
day  its  gold  is  hung  against  the  sky  as  the  grain  is 
lifted  from  the  ships  into  elevators  which  can  store  at 
one  time  twenty-three  million  bushels  of  wheat. 

The  coasts  of  the  lakes  up  which  the  Griffin  led  the 
oarless  way  are  three  thousand  three  hundred  and 
eighty-five  miles  in  length,  or,  including  those  of  the 
lower  lake,  Frontenac,  which  was  also  first  touched  of 
French  keels,  over  four  thousand  miles.  The  statistics 
of  the  traffic  which  has  grown  in  the  furrow  of  that 
wind-drawn  plough  would  be  fatiguing  if  they  did  not 
carry  you  to  heights  of  a  wider  and  more  exhilarating 
view. 

We  have  occupied  and  apportioned  the  billion  acres 
of  French  domain  among  sixty  million  people.  Here 
is  an  added  domain  in  which  no  landmarks  can  be  set 
— which  belongs  to  all  men. 

These  are  a  few  graphic  facts  gathered  from  recent 
reports  and  books  about  the  Great  Lakes:1 

Nearly  as  many  people  live  in   States   that  have 

1  Edward  Channing  and  M.  F.  Lansing,  "The  Story  of  the  Great  Lakes." 
Macmillan,  New  York,  1909.  James  O.  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes." 
Putnam,  New  York,  1909.  James  C.  Mills,  "Our  Inland  Seas."  McClurg, 
Chicago,  1910. 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       207 

ports  upon  those  shores  as  in  France  to-day — between 
thirty-five  and  forty  millions. 

The  lakes  have  a  tonnage  equal  to  one-third  of  the 
total  tonnage  of  North  America.1 

They  have  made  possible  a  saving  in  cost  of  trans- 
portation (and  so  of  production)  of  several  hundred 
million  dollars  in  a  single  year.2 

Only  ninety  million  dollars  have  been  spent  by  the 
government  for  their  improvement  in  the  whole  his- 
tory of  their  occupation,  above  Niagara  Falls,3  while 
France  in  that  time  has  spent  for  harbors  and  water- 
ways alone  seven  hundred  and  fifty  million  dollars.4 
They  have  been  privately  developed. 

Six  times  as  much  freight  passes  over  these  lakes 
as  through  the  Suez  Canal  in  a  year.5 

Three  thousand  five  hundred  vessels  and  more  than 
twenty-five  thousand  men  are  required  to  move  the 
hundred  million  tons  of  freight  which  every  year  would 
fill  a  train  encircling  the  globe.6 

If  one  were  to  stand  on  the  shore  of  that  "charming 
strait,"  between  Erie  and  Huron,  the  Detroit  River 
(which  Hennepin  so  covetously  describes,  wishing  to 
make  settlement  there,  until  La  Salle  reminded  him 
of  his  "professed  passion  for  exploring  a  new  country"), 
one  would  now  see  a  vessel  passing  one  way  or  the 

1  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  4.  "In  1913  the  total  tonnage  of  the 
Great  Lakes  was  2,940,000  tons,  of  the  United  States  7,887,000  tons." — Re- 
port United  States  Commission  of  Navigation. 

2  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  4. 

3  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  9. 

*  "Four  hundred  and  fifty  million  dollars  of  this  total  has  been  for  the 
improvement  and  maintenance  of  the  waterways." — Report  of  National 
Waterways  Commission,  p.  507. 

5  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  6. 

4  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  pp.  25,  26,  and  Report  of  United  States 
Commission  of  Navigation,  191 3. 


208     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

other  every  twelve  minutes,  on  the  average,  day  and 
night  during  the  eight  months  of  open  navigation. 

Nor  are  they  small  sailing  vessels  of  a  few  tons' 
burden,  but  great  sailless,  steam-propelled  hulks, 
carrying  from  five  to  ten  thousand  tons. 

So  it  is  no  fleet  of  graceful  galleons — half  bird,  half 
lion,  as  the  Griffin  was — that  have  followed  in  her 
wake  up  what  Hennepin  called  "the  vast  and  unknown 
seas  of  which  even  the  savages  knew  not  the  end." 
They  have,  in  the  evolution  of  nautical  zoology,  lost 
beak,  wings,  and  feathers,  and  now  like  a  shoal  of  wet 
lions,  tawny  and  black,  their  powerful  heads  and  long 
steel  backs  just  visible  above  the  blue  water,  they 
course  the  western  Mediterranean  from  spring  to 
winter.1 

The  ships  of  the  lion  brood  are,  some  of  them,  five 
or  six  hundred  feet  in  length,  and  carry  eleven  thou- 
sand tons  of  cargo.  I  have  seen  the  skeleton  of  one  of 
these  iron-boned  beasts,  and  I  have  been  told  that 
eight  hundred  thousand  rivets  go  into  its  creation. 
And  upon  hearing  this  I  could  not  but  hear  the  deaf- 
ening clamor  caused  by  La  Salle's  driving  the  first  nail 
or  bolt,  Father  Hennepin  declining  the  honor  because 
of  the  "modesty  of  [his]  religious  profession." 

As  to  the  cargoes  that  these  ships  bring  back,  the 
story  is  even  more  marvellous.     First  in  quantity  is 

*It  is  an  intruding  and  probably  whimsical,  but  fascinating,  thought 
that  the  wings  of  the  griffin  have  become  evolved  into  the  air-ships  which 
first  began  successfully  to  fly,  in  America,  near  the  shores  of  the  lake  on 
which  the  Griffin  itself  was  hatched.  The  Wright  brothers  were  born  near 
one  of  those  lakes.  It  is  not  a  far-fetched  or  labored  thought  which  pictures 
that  simple,  rough-made  galleon — very  like  the  model  of  the  ship  on  the 
shield  of  Paris — as  leading  two  broods  across  the  valley  above  the  Falls, 
one  of  lions  that  cannot  fly  and  one  of  sea-birds,  hydroplanes,  whose  paths 
are  the  air,  but  whose  resting-places  are  the  calm  water;  the  brood  of  the 
sea  and  the  brood  of  the  sky,  hatched  from  one  nest  at  the  water's  edge. 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       209 

iron  ore,  forty-seven  million  four  hundred  and  thirty- 
five  thousand  seven  hundred  and  seventy-one  tons  in 
191 21  from  the  shores  of  Superior,  where  Joliet  had 
made  search  for  copper  mines,  where  Father  Allouez 
— in  the  midst  of  reports  of  baptisms  and  masses — 
tells  of  nuggets  and  rocks  of  the  precious  metal,  and 
where  has  grown  up  in  a  few  years  the  "second  greatest 
freight-shipping  port  on  earth" — a  port  that  bears  the 
name  of  that  famous  French  coureur  de  bois,  Du  Lhut. 
Forty-seven  millions  of  tons,  and  there  are  still  a  bil- 
lion and  a  half  in  sight  on  those  shores,  which  have  al- 
ready given  to  the  ships  hundreds  of  millions  of  their 
dark  treasure. 

After  the  ore,  lumber,  one  billion  one  hundred  and 
sixty-five  million  feet2  in  one  year  (191 1);  a  waning 
amount  from  the  vanishing  forests  that  once  completely 
encircled  these  lakes.  Alexander  Pope,  whose  "Ode 
on  St.  Cecilia's  Day"  I  have  quoted  (and  would  there 
were  a  Homer,  Pope,  or  Kipling  to  sing  this  true 
legend),  speaks  of  Argo  seeing  "her  kindred  trees 
descend  from  Pelion  to  the  Main  " — from  the  mountain 
to  the  sea,  where  Jason's  boat  was  launched.  So,  with 
the  departure  of  the  Griffin  from  her  Green  Bay  Island, 
might  a  prophetic  poet  have  seen  her  masts  beckoning 
all  the  kindred  trees  to  the  water,  in  which  one  hun- 
dred and  sixty  billion  feet  of  pine  have  descended  from 
the  forests  of  Michigan  alone,3  and  that  is  but  one  of 
the  circling  States.  And  there  is  this  singular  fact  to 
be  added,  that  nearly  a  third  of  the  annual  cargo  goes 
to  the  "Tonawandas,"4  the  "greatest  lumber  towns" 

1  "Mineral  Industry,"  21  :  455. 

2  Monthly  Summary  of  Internal  Commerce  of  the  United  States,  Decem- 
ber, 191 1. 

3  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  57. 

4  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  54. 


210    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

in  the  world  that  have  grown  up  practically  on  the 
very  site  of  the  shipyard  at  the  mouth  of  Cayuga 
Creek,  a  little  way  above  the  falls. 

And  after  the  ore  and  lumber,  grain — the  fleece  of 
the  fields,  immensely  more  valuable  than  that  of  the 
forests;  one  hundred  and  fifty  million  bushels  in  one 
year  and  eleven  million  barrels  of  flour — a  fortnight's 
bread  supply  for  the  entire  world.1 

And  after  ore  and  lumber  and  grain,  fuel  and  other 
bulky  necessities  of  life. 

The  casual  relation  between  the  pioneer  building 
and  journey  of  the  Griffin  and  these  statistics  cannot, 
of  course,  be  established,  but  what  no  inspired  human 
prophecy  could  have  divined,  or  even  the  wildest 
dreaming  of  La  Salle  have  imagined,  is  as  sequential 
as  the  history  that  has  been  made  to  trace  all  new- 
world  development  in  the  wake  of  the  caravels  of 
Columbus.  The  storms  of  nature  and  the  jealousies 
in  human  breasts  thwarted  La  Salle's  immediate  am- 
bitions, but  what  has  come  into  that  northern  valley 
has  followed  closely  in  the  path  of  his  purposes,  the 
path  traced  by  his  ship  built  of  the  trees  of  Niagara 
and  furnished  by  the  chandleries  of  Paris. 

The  mystery  of  the  vanishing  of  this  pioneer  vessel 
only  enhances  the  glory  of  its  venture  and  service — as 
its  loss  but  gave  new  foil  to  the  hardihood  of  La  Salle 
and  Tonty.  We  can  imagine  the  golden-brown  skins 
scattered  over  the  blue  waters  as  the  bits  of  the  body 
of  the  son  of  the  king  of  Colchis  strewn  by  Medea  to 
detain  the  pursuers  of  the  Argonauts.  It  was  the  first 
sacrifice  to  the  valley  for  the  fleece.  In  the  depths  of 
these  Lakes  or  on  their  shores  were  buried  the  bones  of 

1  Curwood,  "The  Great  Lakes,"  p.  49. 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       211 

these  French  manners  who,  first  of  Europeans,  trusted 
themselves  to  sails  and  west  winds  on  those  uncharted 
seas. 

But  this  is  not  the  all  of  the  tragic  story.  The  Griffin 
carried  in  her  the  prophecies  of  other  than  lake  ves- 
sels. She  had  in  her  hold  on  that  fateful  trip  the 
cordage  and  iron  for  the  pioneer  of  the  river  ships. 
So  when  she  went  down  she  spoke  to  the  waters  that 
engulfed  her  the  two  dreams  of  her  builder  and  com- 
mander: one  dream  the  navigation  of  the  lakes  and 
the  other  the  coursing  of  the  western  rivers. 

The  Spanish  council  which  decreed  long  ago  that 
"if  it  had  pleased  God  that  .  .  .  rivers  should  have 
been  navigable,  He  would  not  have  wanted  human  as- 
sistance to  make  them  such"  would  be  horrified  by  the 
sacrilege  that  has  been  committed  and  is  being  con- 
templated by  the  followers  of  the  men  of  the  Griffin. 

They  have  made  a  canal  around  the  Falls  (which 
Hennepin  first  saw  breathing  a  cloud  of  mist  over  the 
great  abyss) — a  canal  that,  supplemented  by  other 
canals  along  the  St.  Lawrence  River,  allows  vessels  of 
fourteen-foot  draught  to  go  from  Lake  Erie  to  Montreal 
and  so  on  to  the  sea.  If  this  achievement  were  put 
into  the  poetry  of  legend  it  would  show  the  outwitting 
of  the  dragon. 

They  have  deepened  the  straits  where  the  Griffin 
had  to  wait  for  favorable  breezes  and  soundings  to  pass 
from  Erie  to  Huron — the  Symplegades  (clashing  rocks) 
of  the  new-world  voyage. 

They  have  made  canals  on  either  side  of  the  Sault 
Ste.  Marie — the  rapids  of  the  St.  Mary's  River,  by 
the  side  of  which  St.  Lusson  took  formal  possession  of 
all  that  northern  empire  and  Father  Allouez  made  his 


212    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

extraordinary  address — canals  through  which  sixty-two 
million  tons  passed  in  1910  toward  the  east  and  south. 

They  have  made  and  deepened  harbors  all  the  way 
around  the  shores  till  ships  two  hundred  times  the  size 
of  the  Griffin  can  ride  in  them. 

Yet  this  is  not  all.  The  symbols  of  La  Salle's  vision 
revived  in  the  lakes  memories  of  the  days  when  their 
waters  ran  through  the  Mississippi  Valley  to  the  gulf 
— the  very  course  which  La  Salle's  unborn  Griffin  was 
to  take. 

When  the  continent  tilted  a  little  to  the  east  and  in 
the  tilting  poured  the  water  of  the  upper  lakes  over 
the  Niagara  edge  into  the  St.  Lawrence,  that  same 
tilting  stopped  the  overflow  down  into  the  Mississippi 
and  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  at  the  other  end  of  the  lakes. 
But  so  slight  was  the  tilting  that  the  water  still  sweeps 
over,  in  places,  when  the  lakes  are  high,  and  sometimes 
even  carries  light  boats  across. 

Of  late  engineers  have,  in  effect,  been  undoing  with 
levels  and  scoops  and  dredges  what  nature  did  in  a 
mighty  upheaval.  They  are  practically  tipping  the 
bowls  back  the  other  way  and  so  making  currents  to 
run  down  the  old  channel  toward  the  gulf  through 
the  valleys  of  the  Des  Plaines  and  the  Illinois  to  the 
Mississippi. 

And  so  that  dream  which  the  dying  Griffin  spoke  to 
the  lake,  and  the  lake  to  the  rivers  in  the  time  of  flood 
— when  intercommunication  was  possible — is  to  be 
realized,  except  that  steam  or  electricity  will  take  the 
place  of  winds,  and  screws  of  sails.1 

Meanwhile  a  great  battle  of  the  lakes  is  waging — 
a  battle  of  levels,  it  might  better  be  called,  between 

1  Herbert  Quick,  "  American  Inland  Waterways,"  New  York,  1909. 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       213 

those,  on  the  one  side,  who  wish  to  maintain  the  gran- 
deur of  Niagara  much  as  it  was  when  Hennepin  first 
pictured  it,  and  with  them  those  who  for  utilitarian 
reasons  do  not  wish  its  thunderous  volume  diminished, 
except,  perhaps,  for  their  local  uses,  and  those  also  who 
fear  disaster  to  their  harbors  and  canals  all  around 
the  lakes,  deepened  at  great  expense,  if  water  is  led 
away  toward  the  Mississippi;  and,  on  the  other  side, 
the  public  health  of  millions  at  the  western  end  of  the 
lakes  and  the  commercial  hopes  of  other  millions  in 
the  Mississippi  Valley  waiting  for  the  Griffins  of  the 
lakes  to  come  with  more  generous  prices  for  their 
produce  and  bring  to  their  doors  what  the  rest  of  the 
world  has  now  to  send  to  them  by  the  more  expensive 
railroad. 

Some  day,  perhaps,  the  great  upper  lake,  Superior, 
will  be  made  a  reservoir  where  enough  water  will  be 
impounded  in  wet  seasons  for  a  steady  and  more  gen- 
erous supply  during  the  dry  seasons;  in  which  event 
there  will  be  water  enough  to  keep  Niagara  in  peren- 
nial beauty  and  power,  to  fill  all  the  present  and  pros- 
pective harbors  and  canals  to  their  desired  depths 
and  float  even  larger  fleets  of  Griffins,  and,  at  the 
same  time,  have  enough  left  to  make  the  Mississippi, 
as  the  Frenchman  who  first  saw  it  visualized  it,  and  as 
President  Roosevelt,  two  centuries  later,  expressed  it, 
"a  loop  of  the  sea."1 

But  another  amicable  battle  is  on — a  battle  of  the 
eastern  levels — between  the  men  of  the  old  French 
valley  to  the  north  (i.  <?.,  the  St.  Lawrence)  and  the 
men  of  the  old  Iroquois  valleys  to  the  south,  of  the 
Mohawk  and  the  Hudson.    In  1830  a  canal  was  built 

1  Herbert  Quick,  "  American  Inland  Waterways,"  New  York,  1909. 


2i4     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

by  the  latter  from  above  the  Falls  to  the  navigable 
Hudson,  and  with  high  ceremony  a  cask  of  the  water 
of  Lake  Erie  was  emptied  into  New  York  harbor  as 
symbol  of  the  wedding  of  lake  and  ocean.  Then 
Canada  built  her  Welland  Canal  around  Niagara  and 
made  canals  along  the  St.  Lawrence  and  channels  in 
the  St.  Lawrence  past  the  Lachine  Rapids  to  Mon- 
treal, and  even  made  the  way  from  there  to  the  sea 
deeper  that  the  growing  ocean  vessels  might  come  to 
old  Hochelaga.  Now  New  York  has  begun  deepening 
the  old  and  almost  useless  Erie  Canal  from  seven  and 
nine  feet  to  twelve  feet,  and  to  take  barges  one  hundred 
and  fifty  feet  long  and  twenty-five  feet  beam,  with  a 
draught  of  ten  feet,  and  Canada  is  contemplating  still 
deeper  channels  that  will  let  the  ocean  steamers  into 
every  port  of  the  Great  Lakes.  She  is  even  thinking 
of  a  canal  that  will  follow  the  path  of  Champlain,  up 
the  Ottawa  and  across  the  old  portage  to  Lake  Nipis- 
sing  and  thence  by  the  French  River  into  Lake  Huron; 
and  of  an  alternative  course  by  another  of  Champlain's 
paths,  from  Ontario  across  to  Huron  by  way  of  Lake 
Simcoe  and  the  Trent  River,  in  either  route  avoiding 
Niagara  altogether,  paths  that  would  shorten  the  water 
distance  by  hundreds  of  miles  and  bring  Europe  almost 
as  near  to  the  shores  where  Le  Caron  ministered  to  the 
Hurons  as  to  New  York  City. 

It  is  a  rivalry  between  the  old  Champlain  paths 
and  the  La  Salle  paths,  with  just  an  intimation  from 
those  who  look  far  into  the  future  that  a  new  water 
path  still  farther  north — of  which  Radisson  gave  some 
premonition — may  carry  the  wheat  of  the  far  north- 
west from  Winnipeg  beyond  Superior  and  beyond  the 
courses  of  the  Mississippi   up    to  Hudson   Bay  and 


IN  THE  WAKE  OF  THE  "GRIFFIN"       215 

across  the  ocean  to  European  ports,  brought  a  thou- 
sand miles  nearer. 

This  is  but  the  merest  intimation  of  the  prophetic 
service  of  the  water  pioneers.  And  when  the  prophecy 
of  these  pioneers,  as  interpreted  in  terms  of  steam 
and  locks  and  dams  unknown  to  them,  is  fulfilled,  it  is 
not  beyond  thinking  that  a  captain  of  a  seagoing  ves- 
sel of  ten  or  twenty  thousand  tons  from  Havre  or 
Cherbourg  may  some  day  be  calling  in  deep  voice  (as 
last  summer  in  a  room  on  the  twenty-ninth  floor  of  a 
Chicago  "sky-scraper"  I  heard  a  local  descendant  of 
the  Griffin  screeching)  for  the  lifting  of  the  bridges  that 
will  open  the  way  to  the  Mississippi,  the  heart  of 
America. 


CHAPTER  XI 

WESTERN   CITIES   THAT   HAVE    SPRUNG   FROM 
FRENCH  FORTS 

IT  is  a  strange  and  varied  crop  that  has  grown 
from  the  leaden  plates  with  French  inscriptions, 
planted  by  St.  Lusson,  La  Salle,  and  Celoron  by- 
lakes  and  rivers  in  that  western  country.  The  myth- 
ical story  of  the  sowing  of  Cadmus  in  the  Boeotian  field 
is  again  rather  tame  by  comparison  with  a  true  relation 
of  what  has  actually  occurred  within  the  memory  of  a 
few  generations  in  a  valley  as  wild  when  Celoron  trav- 
ersed the  course  of  La  Belle  Riviere  (the  name  given 
by  the  French  to  the  Ohio,  which  was  known  to  the 
Indians  as  the  "River  of  the  Whitecaps")  with  his 
little  fleet  only  a  century  and  a  half  ago  as  was  Boeotia 
when  Cadmus  set  out  from  Phoenicia  in  search  of  his 
sister,  Europa  (that  is,  Europe),  back  beyond  the 
memory  of  history. 

It  was  a  bourgeoning,  most  miraculous,  in  those 
spots  of  the  west,  a  new  Europa,  where  soldiers  sprang 
up  immediately  upon  the  sowing,  like  the  sproutings 
of  Cadmus'  dragon's  teeth,  to  fight  one  another  and 
to  build  strongholds  that  should  some  day  be  cities, 
even  as  Cadmea,  the  fortress  of  the  "Spartoi,"  became 
the  city  of  Thebes. 

So,  in  this  sowing,  did  France  become  the  mother 
of  western  cities,  of  Pittsburgh  and  Buffalo,  of  Erie,  of 
St.  Louis,  of  Detroit  and  New  Orleans,  of  Peoria  and 

216 


WESTERN  CITIES  217 

St.  Joseph,  and  still  other  cities  whose  names  have 
never  been  heard  by  the  people  of  France — even  as 
Phoenicia,  in  the  wanderings  of  her  adventurous  son, 
Cadmus,  became  the  mother  of  Thebes  and  the  god- 
mother of  Greek  culture  and  of  European  literature. 
Palamedes  and  Simonides  added  some  letters  to  the 
alphabet  brought,  according  to  tradition,  by  Cadmus 
to  Greece,  and  Cadmus  suffered  the  doom  of  those  who 
sow  dragon's  teeth,  as  France  has  suffered,  but  still  is 
his  name  kept  in  the  memory  of  every  school  child; 
and  so  should  be  remembered  those  who  planted  the 
lead  plates  and  sowed  the  teeth  that  sprang  into  the 
"Spartoi"  of  a  new  civilization. 

Of  the  sowing  of  St.  Lusson  at  the  "Soo"  and  La 
Salle  at  New  Orleans  we  have  spoken.  Long  later 
(1749),  the  first  of  whom  we  have  record  after  La 
Salle,  another  French  sower  went  forth  to  sow  along 
the  rivers  close  to  the  foot  of  the  Alleghany  Mountains 
— Celoron  de  Bienville,  Chevalier  de  St.  Louis.  It  is 
of  his  sowing  that  the  main  cities  have  sprung,  for  he 
planted  a  plate  of  "repossession"  at  the  entrance  of 
every  important  branch  of  the  Ohio  and  fastened 
upon  trees  sheets  of  "white  iron"  bearing  the  arms  of 
France.  Chief  among  them  is  Pittsburgh,  which  stands 
on  the  carboniferous  site  of  Fort  Duquesne  like  the  prow 
of  a  vessel  headed  westward,  a  place  which  Celoron 
is  believed  to  have  had  in  mind  when  he  wrote  in  his 
journal,  "the  finest  place  on  La  Belle  Riviere" — what 
was  then  a  wedge  of  wild  black  land  lodged  between 
two  converging  streams  that  drained  all  the  slope  of 
the  northern  Alleghanies  being  now  the  foundation 
of  the  world's  capital  of  a  sterner  metal  than  lead — 
scarred  with    fires   and   smothered   with  smoke   from 


218     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

many  furnaces,  two  of  which  alone,  it  has  been  esti- 
mated by  some  one,  have  poured  forth  enough  molten 
iron  in  the  last  thirty  years  to  cover  with  steel  plates 
an  inch  thick  a  road  fifty  feet  wide  stretching  from 
the  Alleghany  edge  of  the  valley  not  merely  to  the 
mouth  of  the  Ohio  but  on  to  the  other  mountain  bor- 
der, where  all  dreams  of  a  way  to  the  western  sea 
were  ended. 

And  this  highway  of  plates  across  the  empire  of  New 
France  gives  but  suggestion  of  the  meagerest  fraction 
of  the  fruitage  of  the  planting  of  the  leaden  plates  or 
the  grafting  of  the  arms  of  France  upon  the  trees  along 
the  Ohio — forty  pounds  of  iron,  it  has  been  estimated 
by  one  graphic  statistician,  for  every  man,  woman, 
and  child  on  the  globe  to-day,1  and  I  do  not  know  how 
much  tin.  And,  in  a  sense,  all  from  a  small  box  or 
crate  of  plates  made  of  lead — six,  eight,  or  more  in 
number,  eleven  inches  long,  seven  inches  wide,  and  one 
eighth  of  an  inch  thick,  and  engraved  with  an  inscrip- 
tion— one  of  which  was  found  not  long  ago,  by  some 
lads,  protruding  from  the  bank  of  one  of  the  tributary 
rivers  !     The  inscription  ran  (in  translation) : 

"Year  1749,  in  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.,  King  of 
France,  We,  Celoron,  commanding  the  detachment 
sent  by  the  Marquis  De  la  Galissoniere,  Commander 
General  of  New  France,  to  restore  tranquillity  in  cer- 
tain villages  of  these  cantons,  have  buried  this  plate 
at  [here  is  inserted  the  name  of  the  tributary  at  its 
confluence  with  the  Ohio]  this  [date]  as  a  token  of 
renewal  of  possession  heretofore  taken  of  the  aforesaid 
river,  Ohio,  of  all  streams  that  fall  into  it,   and  all 

1 H.  N.  Casson.     United  States  produces  thirty  million  tons  annually, 
Pennsylvania  eleven  and  a  quarter  million.     "Mineral  Resources,"  191 2. 


WESTERN  CITIES  219 

lands  on  both  sides  to  the  sources  of  the  aforesaid 
streams,  as  the  preceding  Kings  of  France  enjoyed  it, 
or  ought  to  have  enjoyed  it,  and  which  they  have 
upheld  by  force  of  arms  and  by  treaties,  notably  by 
those  of  Ryswick,  Utrecht,  and  Aix  la  Chapelle." 

And  with  these  plates  (to  be  buried  at  the  con- 
fluences of  the  important  rivers  along  the  way)  were 
carried  sheets  of  tin — of  white  iron — on  which  the 
arms  of  France  had  been  stamped,  to  be  nailed  to  trees 
above  the  places  of  the  plates. 

"As  the  Kings  of  France  enjoyed  it,  or  ought  to 
have  enjoyed  it" — what  a  blight  of  regret  was  in  the 
very  seed  that  in  its  flower  of  to-day  makes  one  wish 
for  some  delicate  beauty  or  subtle  fragrance  that  is 
not  there,  because  the  Kings  of  France  did  not  let 
France  enjoy  it. 

One  can  but  pause  here  again,  as  I  have  paused 
many,  many  times  in  the  preparation  of  these  chapters, 
to  ask  what  would  have  been  the  result  if  France  had 
but  chosen  as  Portia's  successful  suitor  in  Shake- 
speare's "Merchant  of  Venice"  when  he  was  confronted 
with  the  caskets  of  gold,  silver,  and  lead — had  but 
chosen  "to  owe  and  hazard  all  for  lead,"  instead  of 
deciding  as  did  the  Prince  of  Morocco,  the  other 
suitor,  that  "a  golden  mind  stoops  not  to  shows  of 
dross" — if  France  had  hazarded  all  for  the  holding 
and  settling  of  those  regions  whose  worth  was  sym- 
bolized in  those  unpromising  pieces  of  lead  planted 
in  the  fertile  soil  of  Louisiana,  Michigan,  and  Ohio 
along  the  watercourses,  rather  than  in  the  caskets  of 
gold  and  silver  sought  among  the  mountains — if 
Louis  XV,  throwing  dice  at  Versailles  in  the  valley  of 
the  Seine,  as  Parkman  describes  him,  with  his  piles  of 


220    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

louis  d'or  before  him,  and  the  princes  and  princesses, 
dukes  and  duchesses  and  courtiers  about  him,  had  but 
followed  the  advice  of  Marquis  de  la  Galissonniere,  the 
humpbacked  governor-general  of  Canada,  who  fur- 
nished Celoron  with  his  leaden  seeds  and  appointed  the 
place  of  the  sowing — if  Louis  XV  had  but  answered 
his  Canadian  governor's  prayer  and  sent  French  peas- 
ants where  the  plates  were  buried,  or  had  even  let 
those  who  wanted  to  flee  to  that  valley,  as  they  would 
have  fled  by  tens  of  thousands,  preferring  the  hard- 
ships and  privations  of  the  pioneer  to  the  galleys,  the 
dungeons,  or  the  gallows — then  "Versailles"  in  that 
valley  of  the  Ohio  would  not  be  merely  what  it  is,  a 
ward  or  township  in  a  city  that  bears  the  name  of  a 
British  statesman. 

"Or,  if  soldiers  had  been  sent !"  Parkman,  approach- 
ing the  great  valley  in  imagination  with  Celoron,  from 
the  north,  exclaims,  "the  most  momentous  and  far- 
reaching  question  ever  brought  to  issue  on  this  con- 
tinent was:  'Shall  France  remain  here  or  shall  she 
not  ?'  If  by  diplomacy  or  war  she  had  preserved  but 
the  half  or  less  than  half  of  her  American  possessions, 
then  a  barrier  would  have  been  set  to  the  spread  of 
the  English-speaking  races,  there  would  have  been  no 
Revolutionary  War  and,  for  a  long  time  at  least,  no 
independence."1  (Which  but  emphasizes  what  I  have 
said  as  to  the  part,  the  negative  part  as  well  as 
the  positive,  France  conspicuously  and  unconsciously 
played  in  the  making  of  a  new  nation.) 

If  "the  French  soldiers  left  dead  on  inglorious  con- 
tinental battle-fields  could,"  as  Parkman  says,  "have 
saved  Canada,  and  perhaps  made  good  her  claim  to 

'Parkman,  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe,"  p.  5. 


WESTERN  CITIES  221 

the  vast  territories  of  the  West,"1  could  they  after  all 
have  done  more  for  the  world  than  those  who,  in  effect, 
sacrificed  their  lives  on  glorious  western  battle-fields 
for  the  United  States  ? 

A  little  way  back  I  spoke  of  the  first  expedition 
looking  toward  that  valley  from  the  Atlantic  side  of 
the  Alleghanies — the  expedition  of  the  "Knights  of 
the  Golden  Horseshoe" — and  of  its  vain  threats.  In 
1748  a  company  of  still  wider  horizon  was  formed  in 
Virginia,  George  Washington's  father  being  a  mem- 
ber of  it.  It  was  known  as  the  Ohio  Land  Company 
and  derived  its  transmontane  rights  through  George 
II  from  John  Cabot,  an  Italian  under  English  com- 
mission, who  may  have  set  foot  nearly  two  centuries 
before  somewhere  on  the  coast  of  North  America  be- 
low Labrador,  and  from  a  very  expansive  interpreta- 
tion of  a  treaty  with  the  Indians  at  Lancaster,  Pa.,  in 
1744,  the  trans- Alleghany  Indians  protesting,  however, 
not  less  firmly  than  the  French,  that  the  lands  pur- 
chased by  the  English  under  that  treaty  extended  no 
farther  toward  the  sunset  than  the  laurel  hills  on  the 
western  edge  of  the  Alleghanies. 

News  of  this  Virginia  corporate  enterprise  was 
willingly  carried,  it  is  surmised,  by  jealous  Pennsyl- 
vanians  and  hostile  French,  till  it  reached  Montreal, 
and  so  it  was  that  Celoron  was  despatched  with  his 
little  company  to  bury  "Monuments  of  the  Renewal 
of  Possession"  by  France. 

It  was  a  significant  and  rather  solemn,  but  most 
picturesque,  processional  that  this  chevalier  of  St. 
Louis  led  from  Montreal  through  one  thousand  two 
hundred  leagues  of  journey  by  water  and  land  to  the 

^arkman,  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe,"  p.  41. 


222     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

mouth  of  the  Miami  River  and  back.  There  are  no 
hilarious  songs  in  this  prelude  such  as  were  heard 
from  the  crests  of  the  Blue  Ridge  when  Spotswood's 
horsemen  came  up  from  the  other  side.  It  has  to  me 
the  atmosphere  and  movement  of  some  Greek  tragedy, 
though  one  writer  likens  it  to  mediaeval  mummery. 
Perhaps  it  is  only  a  knowledge  of  its  import  and  the 
end  that  makes  it  sombre  and  grave  despite  the  beau- 
tiful setting  to  this  prelude  which  one  may  read  to-day 
in  the  French  archives.  So  full  of  portent  and  color 
it  is  that  I  wonder  no  one  has  woven  its  incidents, 
slight  as  they  are,  into  French  literature  or  into  that 
of  America. 

"I  left  Lachine  on  the  15th  of  June,"  begins  Celoron's 
journal,1  now  in  the  Departement  de  la  Marine,  in 
Paris,  "with  a  detachment  formed  of  a  captain,  eight 
subaltern  officers,  six  cadets,  an  armorer,  twenty  men 
of  the  troops,  one  hundred  and  eighty  Canadians,  and 
nearly  thirty  savages — equal  number  of  Iroquois  and 
Abenakes."  They  filled  twenty-three  canoes  in  a  pro- 
cession that  was  halted  by  shipwreck,  by  heat,  by  lack 
of  rain  and  by  too  much  rain,  by  difficult  portages,  and 
damage  to  the  canoes. 

Over  a  part  of  their  first  portage  from  Lake  Erie 
I  walked  one  night  years  ago  through  a  drenching  rain, 
such  as  they  endured  in  the  seven  days  in  which  they 
were  carrying  their  canoes  and  baggage  up  those  steep 
hills  through  the  then  dense  forest  of  beech,  oak,  and 
elm,  to  the  waters  of  Lake  Chautauqua,  where  now 
many  thousands  gather  every  summer,  from  children 
to  white-haired  men  and  women,  to  study  history, 
language,  sciences,  cooking,  sewing,  etc.,  and  to  attend 
conferences  daily. 

1  Margiy,  6  :  666. 


WESTERN  CITIES  223 

But  the  expedition  then  was  often  stopped  by 
savages  who  ran  away  to  avoid  the  excessive  speech- 
making  and  lecturing  of  these  old-world  orators,  con- 
ferenciers;  and  the  ears  and  eyes  of  the  auditors  who 
did  not  run  away  were  opened  by  strings  of  wam- 
pum, though  they  were  often  too  little  moved  by  the 
love  of  their  father  Onontio  and  his  concern  lest  the 
English  should  make  themselves  masters  and  the  In- 
dians their  victims. 

There  is  in  a  Paris  library  a  map  of  this  expedi- 
tion made  by  the  hand  of  Pere  Bonnecamps,  who  signs 
himself  "  Jesuitte  Mathematicians"  He  kept  a  diary1, 
also  preserved  in  Paris,  in  which  there  has  crept  some 
of  the  sombreness  of  that  narrow,  dark  valley  (now 
filled  with  oil-derricks)  surrounded  by  mountains  some- 
times so  high  as  to  let  them  see  the  sun  only  from  nine 
or  ten  o'clock  in  the  morning  till  two  or  three  in  the 
afternoon.  And  across  the  mountains  one  may  hear 
even  to-day  the  despairful,  yet  appealing,  voice  of 
Celoron,  speaking  for  the  great  Onontio:  "My  chil- 
dren," he  says,  "since  I  have  been  at  war  with  the 
English  I  have  learned  that  that  nation  has  seduced 
you;  and,  not  content  with  corrupting  your  hearts, 
they  have  profited  by  my  absence  from  the  country  to 
invade  the  land  which  does  not  belong  to  them  and 
which  is  mine.  ...  I  will  give  you  the  aid  you  should 
expect  from  a  good  father.  ...  I  will  furnish  you 
traders  in  abundance  if  you  wish  them.  I  will  send 
here  officers  if  that  please  you — to  give  you  good  spirit, 
so  that  you  will  only  work  in  good  affairs.  .  .  .     Follow 

1  Translation  in  "Jesuit  Relations,"  ed.  Thwaites,  vol.  69.  "Account  of 
the  voyage  on  the  Beautiful  River  made  in  1749  under  the  direction  of 
Monsieur  de  Celoron." 


224    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

my  advice.  Then  the  sky  will  always  be  beautiful  and 
clear  over  your  villages."1 

"My  father,"  said  the  spokesman  for  the  savages 
at  another  council,  "we  pray  you  have  pity  on  us;  we 
are  young  men  who  cannot  reply  as  the  old  men  could; 
what  you  have  said  to  us  has  opened  our  eyes  [received 
gifts],  given  us  spirit,  we  see  that  you  only  work  with 
good  affairs.  .  .  .  [The  great  Onontio  in  Paris  is  play- 
ing all  the  while  in  Paris  with  the  louis  d'or.]  Examine, 
my  father,  the  situation  in  which  we  are.  If  thou 
makest  the  English  to  retire,  who  give  us  necessaries, 
and  especially  the  smith  who  mends  our  guns  and 
hatchets,  we  would  be  without  help  and  exposed  to 
die  of  hunger  and  of  misery  in  the  Belle  Riviere.  Have 
pity  on  us,  my  father,  thou  canst  not  at  present  give 
us  our  necessaries.  Leave  us  at  least  for  this  winter, 
or  at  least  till  we  go  hunting,  the  smith  and  some  one 
who  can  help  us.  We  promise  thee  that  in  the  spring 
the  English  will  retire."2 

And  so  the  expedition  passed  on  from  river  to  river, 
from  tribe  to  tribe,  planting  plates  and  making  ap- 
peals to  the  savages,  down  the  Ohio  to  the  Miami,  up 
the  Miami,  stopping  at  the  village  of  a  chief  known  as 
La  Demoiselle,  thence  by  portage  to  the  French  set- 
tlement on  the  Maumee,  and  so  back  to  Lake  Erie. 
Then  came  the  fort  builders  in  their  wake,  and  so  the 
"Spartoi,"  the  soldiers,  almost  literally  sprang  from  the 
earth  of  the  sowing  of  the  plates. 

At  one  place  (the  place  where  the  Loups  prayed 
for  a  smith)  they  found  a  young  Englishman  with  a 
few  dozen  workmen  building  a  stockade,  but  they 
sent  him  back  beyond  the  mountains  over  which  he 

1  Margry,  6  :  677.  2  Margry,  6  :  683. 


WESTERN  CITIES  225 

had  come  and  built  upon  its  site  Fort  Duquesne — 
the  defense  of  the  mountain  gate  to  the  great  valley — 
here  with  a  few  hundred  men  on  the  edge  of  a  hostile 
wilderness  to  make  beginning  of  that  mighty  struggle 
which  was  to  end,  as  we  know,  on  the  river  by  which 
Cartier  and  Champlain  had  made  their  way  into  the 
continent. 

It  is  a  fact,  remarkable  to  us  now,  that  the  first 
to  bring  a  challenge  from  behind  the  mountains  to 
that  brave  and  isolate  garrison  sitting  in  Fort  Duquesne 
at  the  junction  of  the  water  paths,  was  Washington 
("Sir  Washington,"  as  one  chronicler  has  written  it), 
not  Washington  the  American  but  Washington  the 
English  subject,  major  in  the  colonial  militia,  envoy 
of  an  English  governor  of  Virginia,  Dinwiddie,  who, 
having  acquired  a  controlling  interest  in  the  Ohio 
Company,  became  especially  active  in  planning  to  seat 
a  hundred  families  on  that  transmontane  estate  of  a 
half-million  acres  and  so  to  win  title  to  it. 

"So  complicated  [were]  the  political  interests  of  [that] 
time  that  a  shot  fired  in  America  [was]  the  signal  for 
setting  all  Europe  together  by  the  ears,"  wrote  Vol- 
taire,1 and  "it  was  not  a  cannon-shot"  that  gave  the 
signal  but,  as  Parkman  said,  "a  volley  from  the  hunt- 
ing pieces  of  a  few  backwoodsmen,  commanded  by  a 
Virginia  youth,  George  Washington."2 

We  must  stop  for  a  moment  to  look  at  this  lithe 
young  English  colonist,  twenty-one  years  of  age, 
standing  on  the  nearest  edge  of  the  French  explora- 
tions and  claims  and  the  farthest  verge  of  English  ad- 

1  Voltaire,  "The  French  in  America"  in  his  "Short  Studies  in  English 
and  American  Subjects,"  p.  249. 
*  Parkman,  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe,"  1:3. 


226    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

venture,  on  the  watershed  twenty  miles  from  Lake 
Erie,  and  requesting,  in  the  name  of  Governor  Din- 
widdie  and  of  the  shade  of  John  Cabot,  the  peaceable 
departure  of  those  French  pioneers  and  soldiers,  who, 
as  the  letter  which  the  young  colonel  bore  stated,  were 
"erecting  fortresses  and  making  settlements  upon  the 
the  river  [Ohio]  so  notoriously  known  to  be  the  prop- 
erty of  the  Crown  of  Great  Britain." 

The  edge  of  the  Great  Lakes'  basin  is  only  a  little 
way,  at  the  place  where  he  stood,  from  the  water- 
shed of  the  Mississippi  River.  A  little  farther  up  the 
shore,  where  Celoron  made  portage,  it  is  only  six  or 
eight  miles  across,  and  here  it  is  but  a  little  more,  and 
the  "height  of  land"  is  hardly  noticeable.  The  French 
built  a  fort  on  a  promontory  in  the  lake — a  promon- 
tory almost  an  island — Presque  Isle;  and  there,  where 
the  waters  begin  to  run  the  other  way,  that  is,  toward 
the  gulf,  they  built  still  another  which  they  called 
Le  Bceuf,  an  easier  portage  than  the  Chautauqua. 
From  the  former  fort  the  city  of  Erie,  a  grimy,  busy 
manufacturing  city,  has  grown.  The  latter  has  pro- 
duced only  a  village,  on  whose  weed-grown  outskirts 
the  ruins  of  a  fort  still  look  out  upon  the  meadow 
where  the  little  stream  called  "French  Creek"  starts, 
first  toward  France,  in  its  two-thousand-mile  journey 
to  the  gulf  that  lies  in  the  other  direction. 

For  twenty  miles  I  followed  the  stream  one  day  to 
where  it  became  a  part  of  Celoron's  river — in  imagina- 
tion calling  the  French  back  to  its  banks  again,  but 
finding  them  slow  to  come,  for  that  part  of  the  valley 
seemed  not  particularly  attractive.  It  is  a  little  farther 
down  the  lake  that  the  vineyards  fill  all  the  shore  from 
the  lake  to  the  watershed.    And  in  that  very  country 


WESTERN  CITIES  227 

I  have  often  wondered  at  the  miracle  which  raised 
from  one  bit  of  ground  the  corn  and  the  pumpkin,  and 
from  another  the  vine  and  filled  its  fruit  with  wine. 

The  one-eyed  veteran,  Legardeur  de  St.  Pierre,  the 
commander  of  Fort  Le  Bceuf,  asked  Washington,  in 
rich  diplomatic  sarcasm,  to  descend  to  the  particular- 
ization  of  facts,  and  the  lithe  figure  disappeared  behind 
the  snows  of  the  mountains  only  to  come  again  across 
the  mountains  in  the  springtime  with  sterner  ques- 
tioning. There  was  then  no  talk  of  Cabot  or  La  Salle, 
of  Indian  purchase  or  crown  property.  Jumonville 
may  have  come  out  from  Duquesne  for  peaceable 
speech,  but  Washington  misunderstood  or  would  not 
listen.  A  flash  of  flint  fire,  a  fresh  bit  of  lead  planted 
in  the  hill  of  laurel,  a  splash  of  blood  on  the  rock,  and 
the  war  for  the  west  was  begun. 

What  actually  happened  out  on  the  slope  of  that 
hill  will  never  be  accurately  known;  but,  though  Wash- 
ington was  only  twenty-two  years  old  then,  "full  of 
military  ardor"  and  "vehement,"  he  could  not  have 
been  guilty  of  wilful  firing  on  men  of  peaceful  intent. 

It  doubtless  seemed  but  an  insignificant  skirmish 
when  Washington  attacked  Jumonville  near  Pittsburgh, 
and  it  is  now  remembered  by  only  a  line  or  two  in  our 
histories  and  the  little  cairn  of  stones  "far  up  among 
the  mountain  fogs  near  the  headwaters  of  the  Yough- 
iogheny  River,"  which  marks  the  grave  of  Jumonville. 

Washington,  the  major  of  colonial  militia  in  the  Al- 
leghany Mountains,  the  scout  of  a  land  company,  has 
been  entirely  forgotten  in  Washington,  the  father  of  a 
nation;  but  Jumonville,  the  French  ensign  with  no 
land-scrip,  fighting  certainly  as  unselfishly  and  with 
as  high  purpose,  is  not  forgotten  in  any  later  achieve- 


228     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

ment.  That  skirmish  ended  all  for  him.  But  let  it  be 
remembered  even  now  that  he  was  a  representative  of 
France  standing  almost  alone,  at  the  confluence  of  all 
the  waters  for  hundreds  of  miles  on  the  other  slope  of 
the  Alleghanies,  in  defense  of  what  other  men  of 
France  had  won  by  their  hardihood. 

I  heard  a  great  audience  at  the  Academy  applaud 
the  brave  endurance  of  French  priests  and  soldiers  in 
Asia.  Some  day  I  hope  these  unrenowned  men  who 
sacrificed  as  much  for  France  in  America  will  be  as 
notably  remembered.  There  is  a  short  street  in  Pitts- 
burgh that  bears  Jumonville's  name — a  short  street 
that  runs  from  the  river  into  a  larger  street  with  the 
name  of  one  of  his  seven  brothers,  De  Villiers,  Coulon 
de  Villiers,  who  hastened  from  Montreal,  while  an- 
other brother  hastened  from  the  Illinois  to  avenge  his 
death. 

But  the  cairn  on  the  hillside  has  grown  to  no  high 
monument.  Mr.  Hulbert,  who  has  written  with  filial 
pen  of  the  valley,  says  that  occasionally  a  traveller 
repairs  a  rough  wooden  cross  made  of  boards  or  tree 
branches  and  planted  among  the  rocks  of  the  cairn.1 
But  on  a  recent  visit  to  the  grave  out  in  that  lonesome 
ravine,  I  found  that  a  permanent  tablet  had  been 
placed  there  instead  of  this  fragile  cross. 

I  must  leave  to  your  unrefreshed  memories  the  ex- 
ploits of  Beaujeu  and  Braddock,  of  Contrecceur  and 
Forbes,  blow  up  Fort  Duquesne  of  the  past,  and  come 
into  the  city  of  to-day,  for  I  wish  to  put  against  this 
background  this  mighty  city  where  it  is  often  difficult 
to  see  because  of  the  smoke. 

The  French,  as  we  are  well  aware,  came  to  their 

1  A.  B.  Hulbert,  "The  Ohio  River,"  pp.  44,  45. 


WESTERN  CITIES  229 

forts  by  water.  Quebec,  Frontenac,  Niagara,  Presque 
Isle,  the  Rock  St.  Louis,  St.  Joseph,  Chartres,  and 
many  others  stood  by  river  or  lake.  But  the  going 
was  often  slow.  Celoron  (whose  name  is  often  spelled 
Celeron  but  would  seem  not  to  deserve  that  spelling) 
was  fifty-three  days  in  making  his  water  journey  from 
Montreal  to  the  site  of  Pittsburgh.  But  a  Celoron  of 
to-day  may  see  the  light  of  the  Bartholdi  statue  in 
New  York  harbor  at  ten  o'clock  by  night  and  yet  pass 
Braddock's  field  in  the  morning  (before  the  time  that 
Bonnecamp  said  the  sun  came  up  in  the  narrow  valley 
of  the  Belle  Riviere),  and  have  breakfast  at  the  Du- 
quesne  Club  in  time  for  a  city  day's  work.  It  was 
about  as  far  from  Paris  to  Marseilles  in  1750  as  it  is 
to-day  from  Paris  to  Pittsburgh. 

Pittsburgh  is  the  front  door  of  the  valley  of  La 
Salle,  as  we  now  know  the  valley,  and  the  most  im- 
portant door;  for  the  tonnage  that  enters  and  leaves 
it  by  rail  and  water  (177,071,238  tons  in  1912  for  the 
Pittsburgh  district)  exceeds  the  tonnage  of  the  five  other 
greatest  cities  of  the  world l  and  is  twice  the  combined 
tonnage  of  both  coasts  of  the  United  States  to  and 
from  foreign  ports — which  is  probably  due  to  the  fact 
that  so  much  of  its  traffic  is  not  in  silks  and  furs 
but  in  iron  and  coal.  And  the  multitudes  of  human 
beings  that  pass  through  it  are  comparable  in  number 
with  the  migrant  tonnage  and  inanimate  cargoes;  for 
Pittsburgh  is  "the  antithesis  of  a  mediaeval  town"; 
"it  is  all  motion;"  "it  is  a  flow,  not  a  tank."  The 
mountains,  once  impenetrable  barriers  that  had  to  be 
gone  about,  have  been  levelled,  and  in  the  levelling 

1  R.  B.  Naylor,  address  before  the  Ohio  Valley  Historical  Association 
(quoted  in  Hulbert,  "Ohio  River,"  pp.  365-6). 


230  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  watersheds,  as  we  have  seen,  have  been  shifted. 
One  who  sees  that  throng  pass  to-day  back  and  forth, 
to  and  from  the  valley  and  the  ocean,  must  know  that 
there  are  no  Alleghanies  in  our  continental  topography, 
as  Washington  saw  and  as  Webster  stated  there  could 
not  be  in  our  politics.  If  one  makes  the  journey  from 
the  ocean  in  the  night,  one  may  hear,  if  one  wakes, 
the  puffing  of  two  engines,  as  in  the  Jura  Mountains, 
but  there  will  be  nothing  else  to  tell  him  that  the 
shaggy  Alleghany  Mountains  have  not  been  cast  into 
the  midst  of  the  sea — nothing  except  the  groaning  of 
the  wheels. 

The  Indians  near  Pittsburgh,  I  have  said,  prayed 
the  messenger  of  Onontio  that  they  might  keep  their 
English  smith — and  the  prayer  seems  to  have  been 
abundantly  answered,  for  Pittsburgh  appears  at  first 
to  be  one  vast  smithy,  so  enveloped  is  it  in  the  smoke 
of  its  own  toil,  so  reddened  are  its  great  sky  walls  by 
its  flaming  forges,  so  filled  is  the  air  with  the  dust  from 
the  bellows,  and  so  clangorous  is  the  sound  of  its 
hammers.  It  is  a  city  of  Vulcans — a  city  whose  in- 
dustry makes  academic  discussions  seem  as  the  play 
of  girls  in  a  field  of  flowers.  It  is  not  primarily  a 
market-place,  this  point  of  land,  one  of  the  places 
where  the  French  and  English  traders  used  to  barter 
guns,  whiskey,  and  trinkets  for  furs.  It  is  a  making 
place — a  pit  between  the  hills,  where  the  fires  of  crea- 
tion are  still  burning. 

Celoron  and  his  sombre  voyage  had  been  in  my  mind 
all  day,  as  I  sat  in  a  beautiful  library  of  that  city 
among  books  of  the  past;  but  in  the  evening,  as 
Dante  accompanied  by  Virgil,  I  descended  circle  by 
circle  to  the  floor  of  the  valley — with  this  difference, 


WESTERN  CITIES  231 

that  it  was  not  to  a  place  of  torment  but  to  the  halls 
of  the  swarth  gods  of  creation,  those  great,  dim, 
shadowy  sheds  that  stretch  along  the  river's  edge. 
Into  these,  men  of  France,  has  your  Fort  Duquesne 
grown — mile  on  mile  of  flame-belching  buildings,  with 
a  garrison  as  great  as  the  population  of  all  New  France 
in  the  day  of  Duquesne. 

The  new-world  epic  will  find  some  of  its  color  and 
incident  there — an  epic  in  which  we  have  already  heard 
the  men  of  France  nailing  the  sheets  of  "white  iron" 
against  the  trees  of  the  valley  of  La  Belle  Riviere.  And 
as  I  saw  the  white-hot  sheets  of  iron  issuing  from  those 
crunching  rollers,  driven  by  the  power  of  seven  thou- 
sand horses,  I  felt  that  the  youth  with  the  stamping 
iron  should  have  put  a  fleur-de-lis  upon  each  with  all 
his  other  cabalistic  markings,  for  who  of  us  can  know 
that  any  metal  would  ever  have  flowed  white  from  the 
furnaces  in  that  valley  if  the  white-metal  signs  of 
Louis  XV  had  not  first  been  carried  into  it  ? 

In  each  of  these  halls  there  pass  in  orderly  succes- 
sion cars  with  varied  cargoes;  red  ore  from  the  far- 
away hills  beyond  Superior,  limestone  fragments  from 
some  near-by  hill,  and  scrap  of  earlier  burning.  These, 
one  by  one,  are  seized  by  a  great  arm  of  iron,  thrust 
out  from  a  huge  moving  structure  that  looks  like  a 
battering-ram  and  is  operated  by  a  young  man  about 
whom  the  lightnings  play  as  he  moves;  and,  one  by  one, 
they  are  cast  into  the  furnaces  that  are  heated  to  a 
temperature  of  a  thousand  degrees  or  more.  There 
the  red  earth  is  freed  of  its  "devils,"  as  the  great 
ironmaster  has  named  the  sulphur  and  phosphorus — 
freed  of  its  devils  as  the  red  child  was  freed  of  his  sins 
by  the  touch  of  holy  water  from  the  fingers  of  Allouez 


232     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

out  in  those  very  forests  from  which  the  red  ore  was 
dug — and  comes  forth  purified,  to  be  cast  into  flam- 
ing ingots,  to  be  again  heated  and  then  crushed  and 
moulded  and  sawed  and  pierced  for  the  better  service 
of  man. 

In  the  course  of  a  few  minutes  one  sees  a  few  iron 
carloads  of  ore  that  was  a  month  before  lying  in  the 
earth  beyond  Superior  transformed  into  a  girder  for 
a  bridge,  a  steel  rail,  a  bit  of  armor-plate,  a  beam  for 
a  sky-scraper — and  all  in  utter  human  silence,  with 
the  calm  pushing  and  pulling  of  a  few  levers,  the  ac- 
curate shovelling  by  a  few  hands,  the  deliberate  testing 
by  a  few  pairs  of  experienced  eyes. 

Here  is  the  new  Fort  Duquesne  that  is  holding  the 
place  of  the  confluence  of  the  rivers  and  trails  just 
beyond  the  Alleghanies,  and  this  is  the  ammunition 
with  which  that  begrimed  but  strong-faced  garrison 
defends  the  valley  to-day,  supports  the  city  on  the 
environing  hills  and  the  convoluted  plateau  back  of 
the  point,  spans  streams  the  world  around,  builds  the 
skeletons  of  new  cities  and  protects  the  coasts  of  their 
country. 

There  are  many  others  in  that  garrison,  but  these 
makers  of  steel  are  the  core  of  that  city,  in  which  "the 
modern  world,"  to  use  the  words  of  one  of  our  first 
economists,  "achieves  its  grandest  triumph  and  faces 
its  gravest  problem"1 — the  "mighty  storm  mountain 
of  capital  and  labor." 

I  quote  from  this  same  economist  a  comprehensive 
paragraph  descriptive  of  its  riches:  "Through  hills 
which  line  these  [confluent]  rivers  run  enormous  veins 
of  bituminous  coal.    Located  near  the  surface,  the  coal 

1  John  R.  Commons,  in  Survey,  March  6,  1909,  21  :  105 1. 


WESTERN  CITIES  233 

is  easily  mined,  and  elevated  above  the  rivers,  much  of 
it  comes  down  to  Pittsburgh  by  gravity.  There  are 
twenty-nine  billion  tons  of  it,  good  for  steam,  gas  or 
coke.  Then  there  are  vast  stores  of  oil  [seven  million 
five  hundred  thousand  gallons  annually]  natural  gas 
[of  which  two  hundred  and  fifty  million  feet  are  con- 
sumed daily],  sand,  shale,  clay  and  stone,  with  which 
to  give  Pittsburgh  and  the  tributary  country  the  lead 
of  the  world  in  iron  and  steel,  glass,  electrical  ma- 
chinery, street-cars,  tin  plate,  air-brakes  and  fire- 
brick."1 

And  to  all  this  natural  bounty  the  national  gov- 
ernment has  added  that  of  the  tariff  and  of  millions 
spent  in  river  improvements,  while  Europe  has  con- 
tributed raw  labor  already  fed  to  the  strength  of  oxen 
and  often  already  developed  to  highest  skill.  It  was  a 
young  chemist  trained  in  Europe  who  conducted  me 
through  the  mills,  explaining  all  the  processes  in  a 
perfect  idiomatic  speech,  though  of  broken  accent. 

The  white-hot  steel  ingot  swinging  beneath  a  smoky 
sky  is  a  sign  of  the  contribution  of  France  through 
Pittsburgh  to  civilization,  not  merely  the  material 
but  the  human  contribution.  The  ingot,  a  great 
block  of  white-hot  steel,  is  the  sign  of  her  labor,  which 
has  assembled  the  scattered  elements  of  the  valley 
and,  in  the  fierce  heat  of  natural  and  unfed  fires,  has 
compounded  them  into  a  new  metal  that  is  some- 
thing more  than  iron,  more  valuable  than  gold.  But 
it  is  only  another  sign,  too,  of  forces  that  have  as- 
sembled from  all  parts  of  the  earth,  men  represented 
in  the  varied  cargoes  that  are  poured  by  a  seemingly 

*J.  R.  Commons,  "Wage  Earners  of  Pittsburg,"  in  Survey,  March  6, 
1909,  21  :  1051-64. 


234    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

omnipotent  hand  into  those  furnaces — red-blooded 
men,  and  with  them  slag  that  has  gone  through  the 
fires  of  older  civilizations. 

Here,  let  me  say  again,  is  being  made  a  new  metal; 
this  no  one  can  doubt.  It  is  not  merely  a  melting  and 
a  restamping  of  old  coin  with  a  new  superscription,  a 
new  sovereignty — a  composite  face  instead  of  a  per- 
sonal likeness — it  is  the  making,  as  I  have  said  in  other 
illustrations  and  metaphors,  of  a  new  race. 

If  I  had  an  instinct  of  human  character,  such  as 
the  intuitive  sense  of  the  fibre  and  tension  of  steel 
possessed  by  the  man  who  watches  the  boiling  in  the 
furnaces  and  who,  from  time  to  time,  puts  aside  his 
smoked  glasses  and  looks  at  the  texture  of  a  typical 
bit  of  his  metal,  or  who  stands  at  the  emptying  of  the 
furnace  into  the  ladle  and  directs  the  addition  of 
carbon  or  magnesium  to  bring  his  output  to  the  right 
constituency,  I  could  tell  you  what  strains  and  stresses 
this  new  people  would  stand.  As  it  is,  I  can  only 
make  a  surmise,  perhaps  not  more  valuable  than  yours. 

The  makers  of  steel  were  concerned  only  to  get  the 
primacy  in  steel.  Human  character  was  of  concern 
only  as  it  made  better  steel  and  more  of  it.  They 
took  the  red  ore  where  they  could  get  it  richest  in  iron 
and  cheapest,  and  they  took  red-blooded  labor  where 
they  could  get  it  strongest-sinewed,  clearest-eyed,  and 
cheapest.  "There  are  no  able-bodied  men  between 
the  ages  of  sixteen  and  fifty  years  left  in  my  native 
town,"  said  a  Servian  workman  in  the  mills.  "They 
have  all  come  to  America.  The  agricultural  districts 
and  villages  of  the  mid-eastern  valleys  of  Europe  are 
sending  their  strongest  men  and  youths,  nourished  of 
good  diet  and  in  pure  air,  stolid  and  care-free,  into 


WESTERN  CITIES  235 

that  dim  canyon — Servians,  Croatians,  Ruthenians, 
Lithuanians,  Slovaks,  with  Italians,  Poles,  and  Rus- 
sian Jews."1  It  is  from  Slavs  and  mixed  people  of  the 
old  European  midland,  says  one,  "where  the  suc- 
cessive waves  of  broad-headed  and  fair-haired  peoples 
gathered  force  and  swept  westward  to  become  Celt 
and  Saxon,  and  Swiss  and  Scandinavian  and  Teuton," 
the  old  European  midland  with  its  "racial  and  religious 
loves  and  hates  seared  deep,  that  the  new  immigration 
is  coming  to  Pittsburgh  to  work  out  civilization  under 
tense  conditions" — not  with  that  purpose,  to  be  sure, 
but  with  that  certain  result.  The  conscious  purposes 
have  been  expressed  in  the  tangible  ingots,  the  wages 
they  have  offered  them  in  their  hot  hands,  and  the 
profits.    The  civilization  has  been  incidental. 

There  is  developing,  however,  an  effort  in  the  midst 
of  this  "dynamic  individualism"  to  make  both  the  new 
and  the  old  immigration  work  out  "civilization." 
This  individualism  was  prodigal,  profligate,  at  first. 
But  it  has  learned  thrift;  it  by  and  by  came  to  burn  its 
gas  over  and  over;  it  made  the  purifying  substances 
go  on  in  a  continued  round  of  service;  it  became  more 
mindful  of  human  muscles  and  bones  and  eyes  and 
ears;  it  took  the  latest  advice  of  experts,  but  for  steel's 
sake,  not  civilization's. 

Mr.  Carnegie,  when  a  manufacturer  there,  found 
90  per  cent  of  pure  iron  in  the  refuse  of  his  competitor, 
it  is  said.  This  he  bought  under  long  contract  and 
worked  over  in  his  own  mills.  His  neighbor's  waste 
became  a  part  of  his  fortune.    And  the  result  of  that 

1  P.  Roberts,  "The  New  Pittsburg,"  in  Charities  and  the  Commons, 
January  2,  1909,  21  :  533.  See  also  J.  A.  Fitch,  "The  Steel  Workers," 
New  York,  19 10. 


236    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

discernment  and  thrift  is  now  furnishing  an  analogue 
for  the  conscious  utilization  of  other  waste — waste  of 
native  capacity  of  the  steel-worker  for  happiness  and 
usefulness. 

Mr.  Carnegie  has  indeed  led  the  way  in  the  estab- 
lishment of  libraries,  art  galleries,  museums,  institutes 
of  training  and  research  out  of  what  were  but  waste 
if  spent  as  some  millionaires  spend  their  profits.  All 
these  things  upon  the  hills  are  by-products  of  the  steel- 
mills  down  in  the  ravine.  In  every  luminous  ingot 
swung  in  the  mills  that  were  his,  there  is  something 
toward  the  pension  of  a  university  professor  out  in 
Oregon,  something  for  an  artist  in  New  York  or  Paris, 
something  for  an  astronomer  on  the  top  of  Mount 
Wilson,  something  for  the  teacher  in  the  school  upon 
the  hill,  something  for  every  library  established  by 
his  gift. 

What  is  now  making  itself  felt,  however,  is  a  desire 
to  get  the  wage  element  in  the  ingot  as  thriftily,  as 
efficiently,  as  nobly  converted  and  used  to  the  last 
ounce  as  is  the  profit  element.  There  has  been  in  the 
past  a  masterful  individualism  at  work.  Now  there  is 
a  masterful  aggressive  humanism  beginning  to  make 
itself  felt,  comparable  in  its  spirit  with  the  masterful 
venturing  of  the  French  explorers  or  the  masterful 
faith  of  the  French  missionaries,  that  promises  to  con- 
strain the  city  "to  the  saving  and  enhancing  of  in- 
dividual and  collective  human  power,"  even  as  the 
French  missionaries  tried  to  constrain  the  great  fur- 
trading  prospects  of  France  to  the  saving  of  human 
souls. 

The  attempt  to  realize  an  urban  paradise  is  becom- 
ing a  conscious  purpose  as  this  extract  made  from  a 


WESTERN  CITIES  237 

report  made  to  a  city-plan  committee  of  a  Pittsburgh 
commission  will  indicate: 

"A  third  undeveloped  asset  in  the  Pittsburgh  water- 
front is  its  value  for  recreation  and  as  an  element  of 
civic  comeliness  and  self-respect.  One  of  the  deplorable 
consequences  of  the  short-sighted  and  wasteful  com- 
mercialism of  the  later  nineteenth  century  lay  in  its 
disregard  of  what  might  have  been  the  aesthetic  by- 
products of  economic  improvement;  in  the  false  impres- 
sion spread  abroad  that  economical  and  useful  things 
were  normally  ugly;  and  in  the  vicious  idea  which  fol- 
lowed, that  beauty  and  the  higher  pleasures  of  civilized 
life  were  to  be  sought  only  in  things  otherwise  useless. 
Thus  the  pursuit  of  beauty  was  confounded  with  ex- 
travagance. 

"Among  the  most  significant  illustrations  of  the  fal- 
lacy of  such  ideas  are  the  comeliness  and  the  incidental 
recreation  value  which  attach  to  many  of  the  com- 
mercial water  fronts  of  European  river  ports,  and  it  is 
along  such  lines  that  Pittsburgh  still  has  opportunity 
for  redeeming  the  sordid  aspect  of  its  business  centre. 

"Wherever  in  the  world,  as  an  incident  of  the  high- 
ways and  wharves  along  its  river  banks,  a  city  has  pro- 
vided opportunity  for  the  people  to  walk  and  sit  under 
pleasant  conditions,  where  they  can  watch  the  water 
and  the  life  upon  it,  where  they  can  enjoy  the  breadth 
of  outlook  and  the  sight  of  the  open  sky  and  the  op- 
posite bank  and  the  reflections  in  the  stream,  the  result 
has  added  to  the  comeliness  of  the  city  itself,  the 
health  and  happiness  of  the  people,  and  their  loyalty 
and  local  pride.  This  has  been  true  in  the  case  of  a 
bare  paved  promenade,  running  along  like  an  elevated 
railroad  over  the  sheds  and  tracks  and  derricks  of  a 
busy  ocean  port,  as  at  Antwerp,  in  the  case  of  a  tree- 


238     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

shaded  sidewalk  along  a  commercial  street  with  the 
river  quays  below  it,  as  at  Paris  and  Lyons  and  hun- 
dreds of  lesser  cities;  and  in  the  case  of  a  broad  em- 
bankment garden  won  from  the  mud  banks  by  dredging 
and  filling,  as  at  London." 

I  had  great  difficulty  in  finding  a  bookstore  in 
Pittsburgh.  Some  day  that  idealistic  condition  which 
makes  the  Seine  so  dear  to  thousands  who  know  its 
every  mood,  and  so  dear  both  to  the  wise  and  the  igno- 
rant, may  obtain  on  La  Belle  Riviere. 

This  is  but  one  item  of  a  planning  for  the  future  of 
this  city  which  thinks  not  merely  of  its  beautifying 
and  of  the  pleasure  of  its  people  in  their  leisure,  but  of 
all  conditions  which  affect  the  health,  convenience,  edu- 
cation, and  general  welfare  of  the  whole  district — that 
region  once  called  the  "black  country,"  of  which  Pitts- 
burgh was  the  "dingy  capital" — one  of  the  regions 
where  the  French  were  pioneers. 

I  have  spoken  of  this  as  the  "taking  thought"  of  a 
democratic  community.  More  accurately,  a  body  of 
one  hundred  volunteer  citizens,  disposing  themselves 
in  fourteen  different  committees  (including  those  on 
rapid  transit,  industrial  accidents,  city  housing,  and 
public  hygiene),  have  undertaken  all  this  labor  of  con- 
structive planning  at  their  own  expense  (based  upon  a 
series  of  investigations  made  by  endowed  researchers), 
but  with  the  hope  of  creating  a  public  opinion  favor- 
able to  their  plans,  which  look  to  the  establishment  by 
the  democratic  community  of  "such  living  and  working 
conditions  as  may  set  a  standard  for  other  American 
industrial  centres."  1 

'Olmsted,  F.  L.,  "Pittsburgh,  Main  Thoroughfares  and  the  Down-Town 
District."  Pittsburgh  Civic  Commission,  1910.  Survey,  February  4,  191 1, 
25:740-4- 


WESTERN  CITIES  239 

No  such  thorough  and  systematic  study  of  existing 
city  conditions  has  been  made  anywhere  else  in  Amer- 
ica. It  is  quite  as  scientific  as  the  scholarly  studies  of 
buried  cities,  only  immensely  more  complex  and  dif- 
ficult. Knowing  itself  and  possessed  of  an  uncon- 
querable spirit,  it  seems  likely  now  that  Pittsburgh 
will  win  back  the  beautiful  site  which  Celoron  remarked 
when  he  passed  down  La  Belle  Riviere — a  site  which 
even  "Florence  might  covet" — and  will  make  it  a 
city  that  will  deserve  to  keep  always  the  other  part 
of  the  name  of  the  sower  of  the  leaden  plates — Bien- 
ville. 

A  pillar  of  cloud  stands  over  the  city  by  day  and  a 
pillar  of  fire  by  night.  They  have  together  shown  the 
way  out  of  the  wilderness.  It  now  remains  to  be  seen 
whether  the  highest  things  of  men's  longing  will  have 
realization,  in  giving  that  "dynamic  individualism"  a 
social  ideal  with  distinct,  practicable  working  plans. 

Pittsburgh  stands  on  the  edge  of  the  valley  of  the 
new  democracy.  It  has  put  its  plates  along  every 
path.  There  is  hardly  a  village  of  any  size  from  the 
Alleghanies  to  the  Rockies  that  it  has  not  laid  some 
claim  to  by  its  strips  of  steel.  There  is  hardly  a  stream 
of  any  size  that  it  has  not  claimed  by  a  bridge.  It 
has,  indeed,  the  spirit  of  Celoron,  in  other  body,  still 
planting  monuments  of  France's  renewal  of  possession, 
wherever  the  steel  rails  and  girders  and  plates  from  the 
Pittsburgh  mills  have  been  carried.  And  Pittsburgh 
is  but  one  of  the  renewed  cities  which  encompass  the 
eastern  half  of  the  valley  where  once  stretched  the 
chain  of  French  forts  futile  in  defense  but  powerful 
in  prophecy. 

When  we  see  the  American  city,  even  through  the 


240    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

eyes  of  Walt  Whitman,  that  poet  of  democracy,  it 
seems  a  desperate  hope  that  is  left  her:  "Are  there, 
indeed,  men  here  in  the  city,"  he  asks,  "worthy  the 
name  ?  Are  there  athletes  ?  Are  there  perfect  women 
to  match  the  generous  material  luxuriance  ?  Is  there 
a  pervading  atmosphere  of  beautiful  manners  ?  Are 
there  crops  of  fine  youths  and  majestic  old  persons  ? 
Are  there  arts  worthy  freedom  and  a  rich  people  ?  Is 
there  a  great  moral  and  religious  civilization — the  only 
justification  of  a  great  material  one  ?  Confess  that 
to  severe  eyes,  using  the  moral  microscope  upon  hu- 
manity, a  sort  of  dry  and  flat  Sahara  appears,  these 
cities  crowded  with  petty  grotesques,  malformations, 
phantoms,  playing  meaningless  antics.  Confess  that 
everywhere,  in  shop,  street,  church,  theatre,  barroom, 
official  chair,  are  pervading  flippancy  and  vulgarity, 
low  cunning,  infidelity — everywhere  the  youth  puny, 
impudent,  foppish,  prematurely  ripe — everywhere  an 
abnormal  libidinousness,  unhealthy  forms,  male,  female, 
painted,  padded,  dyed,  chignon'd,  muddy  complexions, 
bad  blood,  the  capacity  for  good  motherhood  decreas- 
ing or  deceas'd,  shallow  notions  of  beauty,  with  a 
range  of  manners,  or  rather  lack  of  manners  (consider- 
ing the  advantages  enjoy'd)  probably  the  meanest  to 
be  seen  in  the  world."1 

But  it  is  no  such  desperate  hope  that  the  cities  we 
have  seen  spring  from  French  fort  and  portage  keep  in 
their  hearts.  It  is  not  even  a  confession  that  one  would 
have  to  make  to-day  in  the  American  cities  which 
Whitman  had  in  mind  in  his  gloomy,  foreboding  vision. 
I  have  seen  on  the  streets  of  one  of  the  Whitman  cities2 

1  "Democratic  Vistas,"  in  his  "Complete  Works,"  pp.  205,  206. 

2  New  York  City. 


WESTERN  CITIES  241 

those  same  grotesques,  malformations,  and  meaningless 
antics,  that  flippancy  and  vulgarity  and  cunning,  that 
foppishness  and  premature  ripeness,  that  painted,  bad- 
complexioned,  bad-mannered,  shallow-beautied  hu- 
manity; but  touching,  as  I  have  had  opportunity  to 
touch,  three  of  the  great  agencies  of  its  aspirations — 
its  philanthropies,  its  literature,  and  its  schools — I 
know  that  no  body  of  five  million  people,  whether 
huddled  in  tenements  or  scattered  over  plain  and  moun- 
tain and  along  rivers  and  seas,  has  with  more  serious 
or  sacrificing  purpose  aspired,  though  constantly  dis- 
turbed in  its  prayers,  its  operations,  by  people  of  every 
tongue,  nearly  a  million  strong,  who  are  emptied  at  her 
port  every  year  from  Europe  and  Asia,  besides  the 
hundreds  of  thousands  who  come  up  from  the  country. 
There  are  public  schools,  for  example,  in  certain  parts 
of  that  city  where  there  is  not  a  child  of  American 
parentage.  There  is  one,  in  particular,  which  I  visit 
frequently  and  which  I  call  the  "oasis"  in  the  desert 
of  humanity  (Walt  Whitman's  Sahara),  where  two  or 
three  thousand  children  are  gathered,  literally  from 
the  plains  of  Russia,  the  valleys  of  Italy,  and  other 
parts  of  Europe — for  these  were  their  ancestral  homes, 
though  they  come  immediately  from  the  swarming 
streets  and  dimly  lighted,  ill-smelling  tenements  of 
New  York — and  there,  aspiring  under  the  hopeful 
teaching  of  the  city,  I  have  heard  them,  boys  and  girls 
together,  sing,  with  all  the  joy  and  cleanliness  of 
shepherd  children,  of  a  leading  in  green  pastures  and 
by  still  waters. 

But  to  come  back  to  the  cities  in  the  valley  of  Nou- 
velle  France,  there  is  no  note  of  else  than  hope  there. 
Mistakes,     disappointments,     crudities,     infidelities  ? 


242     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Yes,  but  the  mistakes,  disappointments,  crudities, 
failures  of  youth — youth  of  strong  passions  and  love 
of  play  but  of  a  masterful  will  that  a  generous  nature 
has  so  much  encouraged  and  aided  as  to  obscure  its 
limitations. 

A  few  rods  from  the  Carnegie  Library  and  Museum 
of  Art  and  Concert  Hall  in  Pittsburgh  is  a  baseball 
field,  where  a  million  people  or  more  come  in  the  course 
of  the  season  to  see  trained  men  play  an  out-of-door 
game  (and  if  it  chanced  that  the  President  of  the 
United  States  were  visiting  the  city,  he  might  be  seen 
there  accompanied  by  his  secretary  of  state  or  the 
president  of  a  great  university).  In  Chicago  I  found 
the  whole  city,  young  and  old,  united  in  its  interest  in 
the  results  of  the  "game"  of  the  day  before  or  the 
prospects  of  the  next.  When  games  are  played  for  the 
great  championship  pennant  the  city  virtually  takes  a 
holiday. 

But  that  is  the  spirit  of  youth  in  those  overgrown, 
awkward  cities  that  are  only  now  beginning  to  be  self- 
conscious  and  seriously  purposeful  in  doing  more  than 
the  things  conventionally  and  for  the  most  part  sel- 
fishly done  by  cities  generally.  In  the  conjugation  of 
their  busy,  noisy  life  they  do  not  often  use  the  past 
tense,  never  the  past-perfect,  and  they  have  had  for 
the  most  part  little  concern  as  to  the  future,  except 
the  rise  in  real-estate  values  and  the  retaining  of 
markets.  When  in  Pittsburgh  I  asked  a  prominent 
man,  of  French  ancestry,  why  the  people  did  not  keep 
from  the  destroying  hand  of  private  enterprise  the 
site  of  old  Fort  Duquesne  (the  fecund  plot  from  which 
the  great  city  had  grown),  and  he  said  it  was  all  they 
could  do  to  keep  the  little  blockhouse  that  remained 


WESTERN  CITIES  243 

of  Fort  Pitt,  filling  a  space  a  few  yards  square.  What 
claim  has  the  past  as  against  the  needs  of  industry  in 
the  present  ?  That  was  the  attitude  of  that  grimy  in- 
dividualism born  in  "barefoot  square"  or  in  "slab 
alley,"  in  the  land  of  smoke  and  flame  and  "rusty 
rivers." 

And  the  future  ?  Well,  the  voice  of  the  French 
priest  and  of  those  ministers  of  his  own  and  other 
faiths  that  have  followed  in  his  footsteps  is  still  heard 
there  crying  of  the  world  to  come. 

Several  years  ago  on  my  way  into  that  valley,  on 
one  of  those  fast  trains  that  tie  the  east  and  west  to- 
gether, we  came  shrieking,  thundering  down  the  moun- 
tain slopes  in  the  dusk  of  the  day,  past  Jumonville's 
grave,  past  Braddock's  field,  past  miles  on  miles  of 
glowing  coke-ovens,  past  acres  upon  acres  of  factories 
with  their  thousands  of  lighted  windows,  past  flaming 
towers  and  chimneys  into  the  midst  of  the  modern 
babel,  the  tops  of  whose  buildings  were  hidden  in  smoke, 
when  suddenly,  above  the  noise  and  clangor  of  whistles 
and  wheels,  I  heard  the  rich,  deep  voice  of  a  cathedral 
bell  telling  that  the  priest  was  still  at  the  side  of  the 
explorer  and  trader  and  the  iron  coureur  de  bois. 

It  is  not,  however,  of  the  celestial  but  of  the  terres- 
trial future  that  I  am  permitted  to  speak. 

For,  as  I  intimated,  these  young  cities  of  the  west, 
only  a  half-century  old  as  cities — children  by  the  side 
of  Paris,  London,  Rome — are  beginning  seriously  to 
take  thought  of  the  morrow,  not  simply  of  multiplying 
their  numbers  nor  of  sending  their  multitudes  back 
to  the  country  but  of  giving  them  prospect  and 
promise  of  a  better,  more  comfortable,  more  whole- 
some life,  capable  of  a  higher  individual  and  collective 


244    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

development  within  the  city.  For  while  cities  have 
been  preached  against  since  the  time  when  Jonah 
cried  against  Nineveh,  and  while  cities  have  perished 
and  have  been  buried,  even  as  Nineveh,  the  generic 
city,  the  assembling  of  gregarious  men,  continues  and 
increases. 

The  census  returns  for  1910  for  the  American  cities 
show,  so  far  as  I  noticed,  scarcely  a  single  loss  of  popu- 
lation in  the  last  ten  years1  and  a  large  gain  for  nearly 
every  city  of  the  middle  west.  It  is  prophesied  that 
before  long  one-half  of  the  people  of  the  United  States 
will  be  living  in  cities,  and  there  is  the  more  distant 
prospect  that  the  urban  population  will  be  two-thirds 
of  the  whole.2 

It  is  hopeless  to  try  to  turn  that  tide  away  from  the 
cities  except  to  suburban  fields.  So  the  great  problem 
of  that  valley  is  to  improve  the  cities,  since  from  them 
are  to  be  the  issues  of  the  new  life,  since  they  are,  in- 
deed, the  hope  of  democracy. 

I  have  thought  it  of  significance  that  the  envisioned 
place  of  ultimate  celestial  felicity — seen  though  it  was 
by  a  man  in  the  solitude  of  a  cave  in  an  island  of  the 
Mediterranean  (the  place  which  the  civilized  world 
has  dimly  hanging  over  it,  whenever  it  looks  away  from 
its  tasks  and  into  the  beyond) — is  not  a  lotus-land,  not 
an  oasis  of  spring  and  palm,  not  a  stretch  of  forest  and 
mountain,  not  even  a  quiet  place  by  a  sea  of  jasper, 
but  a  place  of  many  tenements — a  city,  a  perfect  city 

1  Cities  with  losses  of  population  in  the  decade  are  Galveston,  Texas: 
37)3^9  in  1900,  36,981  in  1910;  Chelsea,  Mass.:  34,072  in  1900,  32,452  in 
1910;  St.  Joseph,  Mo.:  102,979  in  1900,  77,403  in  1910. 

2  In  1910  46.3  per  cent  resided  in  communities  classed  by  the  census  as 
urban,  and  55.1  per  cent  in  cities  and  incorporated  or  unincorporated 
villages. 


WESTERN  CITIES  245 

to  be  sure,  let  down  ultimately  from  the  skies,  with 
walls  of  precious  stones — and  no  zone  for  Kipling's 
"Tomlinsons"  about  it — with  gates  whose  octroi 
officials  keep  out  whatever  makes  an  abomination  or 
a  lie,  but  which  are  open  to  the  east  and  west,  the 
north  and  south,  that  the  kings  of  earth  may  bring 
their  glory  and  honor  into  it — a  city  whose  streets  are 
clean  and  smooth — a  city  that  has  flowing  through  it 
a  river  of  pure  water,  on  whose  banks  grow  trees  whose 
leaves  are  for  the  healing  of  the  nations. 

The  obvious  thing  to  do,  since,  good  or  bad,  the 
country  is  emptying  its  population  into  the  cities, 
since  we  cannot  go  back  through  the  gates  of  Eden 
into  the  garden  paradise  of  Genesis,  is  to  go  toward  the 
city  of  the  Apocalypses,  not,  to  be  sure,  as  the  Oriental 
mind  of  John  saw  it,  paved  and  walled  with  precious 
stones  and  gold,  but  made  as  beautiful  as  the  Occidental 
taste  and  architectural  skill  will  permit,  as  comfortable 
as  Occidental  standards  demand,  and  as  sanitary  as  the 
mortal  desire  for  immortality  can  with  finite  wisdom 
make  it. 

I  was  speaking  some  time  ago  of  a  painting  I  once 
saw,  in  illustration  of  the  death  of  Eve,  which  repre- 
sented her  as  on  a  journey  in  her  haggard  old  age, 
accompanied  by  Cain  (whose  son  built  the  first  city 
in  a  wilderness),  and  as  pausing  in  the  journey  on  a 
height  of  ground,  pointing  toward  a  little  cluster  of 
trees  in  the  distance,  and  saying  to  her  son:  "There 
was  Paradise."  But  paradise  is  not  to  be  realized  by 
the  masses  of  men  in  the  return  of  man  to  the  forests. 
The  healing  trees  and  the  river  are  to  be  carried  to  the 
city. 


CHAPTER  XII 

WESTERN    TOWNS    AND    CITIES    THAT    HAVE 
SPRUNG  FROM  FRENCH  PORTAGE  PATHS 

THE  old  French  portage  paths  were  also  fruitful 
of  cities  on  the  edge  of  the  Mississippi  Valley, 
though  the  growth  of  these  short  paths  was 
not — with  one  notable  exception — as  luxuriant  as  that 
from  the  earth  enriched  of  human  blood  and  bones 
about  the  old  French  forts. 

These  portages,  or  carrying  paths,  which  differ 
from  the  trails  of  the  wood  runners  in  that  they  are 
but  short  interruptions  of  the  water  paths  and  were 
not  designed  or  laid  out,  as  a  rule,  by  the  wild  en- 
gineers of  the  forests  and  prairies  but  by  human  feet, 
lie  across  the  great  highway  along  which,  before  the 
days  of  canals,  one  might  have  walked  dry-shod  from 
the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific — between  the  basins  of  the 
St.  Lawrence  and  the  Atlantic,  the  Great  Lakes  and 
the  Mississippi,  the  Pacific  and  the  Arctic — a  highway 
which  has,  however,  been  trodden  by  no  one  probably 
through  its  entire  length,  for  in  places  it  runs  over 
inaccessible  peaks  of  mountains  and  winds  around  the 
narrowest  of  ledges.  But  the  paths  across  it — those 
connecting  the  streams  that  flow  in  opposite  directions 
from  the  continental  watersheds — are  like  isthmian 
paths  between  great  oceans — great  dry  oceans  with 
watercourses  through  them. 

There  were,  to  be  sure,  still  other  portage  paths 

246 


WESTERN  TOWNS  247 

than  those  across  watersheds,  and  the  most  common 
were  those  that  led  around  waterfalls  or  impassable 
rapids,  such  as  Champlain  and  the  Jesuits  followed  on 
their  journeys  up  the  Ottawa  to  the  Nipissing.  It 
was  of  such  portages  that  Father  Brebeuf  wrote — port- 
age paths  passing  almost  continually  by  torrents,  by 
precipices,  and  by  places  that  were  horrible  in  every 
way.  In  less  than  five  days  they  made  more  than 
thirty-five  portages,  some  of  which  were  three  leagues 
long.  This  means  that  on  these  occasions  the  traveller 
had  to  carry  on  his  shoulders  his  canoe  and  all  his 
baggage,  with  so  little  food  that  he  was  continually 
hungry  and  almost  without  strength  and  vigor.1  An- 
other priest  tells  of  a  portage  occupying  an  entire  day, 
during  which  he  climbed  mountains  and  pierced  forests 
and  carried,  the  while,  his  chapel  and  his  little  store 
of  provisions. 

Of  whatever  variety,  however,  these  portage  paths 
were  frequently  burying-grounds.  Sometimes  altars 
were  erected  beside  them.  They  were  often  places  of 
encampments,  of  assemblies,  and  more  often  of  am- 
buscades. So  it  came  about,  too,  that  they  were  made 
the  places  of  minor  forts  or  gave  occasion  for  forts 
farther  on  the  way.  In  those  precivilized  Panama 
days,  the  neutrality  of  the  isthmian  paths  could  not 
be  assured,  and  so  they  were  fortified. 

Celoron  tells  of  the  mending  of  boats  at  the  end 
of  his  Chautauqua  portages,  and  that  statement,  with 
other  like  incidents,  has  led  one  authority  to  picture 
the  birches — those  beautiful  white  and  golden  trees 
of  the  sombre  northern  woods  that  gave  their  cloaks 
to  the  travellers  who  asked  and  shivered  till  they  grew 

1  "Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  8  :  75-77. 


248     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

others — stripped  of  their  bark  where  those  paths  came 
down  to  the  streams.  He  has  even  imagined  primi- 
tive carpenter  shops  and  ovens  and  huts  on  these  paths 
where  the  voyageurs  must  stop  for  repairs,  food,  and 
rest — the  precursors  of  garage,  road-house,  and  hotel. 

But  on  maps  in  the  Bibliotheque  Nationale  names 
of  portage  paths  have  been  found  which  assure  us  that 
these  difficult  ways  were  not  without  charm  to  those 
early  travellers,  as  they  have  been  to  many  a  wan- 
derer since;  for  there  was  Portage  des  Roses,  where 
the  wild  rose  brightened  the  way;  and  Portage  de  la 
Musique,  where  the  water  sang  constantly  its  song  in 
the  solitude.  Then  there  were  Portage  de  la  Roche 
Fendue,  Portage  des  Chenes,  Portage  des  Perches, 
Portage  Talon,  and  Portage  des  Recollets,  named  in 
memory  of  experiences  of  men  whom  the  voyageurs 
wished  to  recall  or  to  honor,  just  as  the  French  give 
to  their  streets  such  names  as  "Rue  des  Fleurs," 
"Boulevard  des  Capucines."1 

The  portage  paths  that  became  in  time  most  fruit- 
ful were  generally  short,  well-cleared,  and  deep-fur- 
rowed by  feet.  On  three  of  the  most  important  and 
historic  of  these  paths  from  the  basin  of  the  Great 
Lakes  to  that  of  the  Mississippi  I  have  walked  with 
the  memories  of  these  precursors;  in  one  place  it  was 
suggested  that  I  should  ride  in  a  carriage,  but  I  re- 
fused, feeling  that  these  men  must  be  worshipped  on 
foot. 

The  first  of  these  portages  is  that  path  of  which  I 
have  already  spoken  several  times  (and  which  I  never 
tire  of  letting  my  imagination  travel  again),  the  one 
over  which  Nicolet  must  have  passed  from  the  Fox 

1  A.  B.  Hulbert,  "  Historic  Highways  of  America,"  7  :  49. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  249 

River  into  the  Wisconsin  River,  if  he  got  so  far  on  his 
way  to  Muscovy — the  path  to  which  Father  Dablon 
said  the  way  was  as  through  a  paradise,  but  was  as 
hard  as  the  way  to  heaven1 — the  path  which  the 
coureurs  de  bois  Radisson  and  Groseilliers  doubtless 
followed;  the  path  which  La  Salle  may  have  found  in 
those  two  years  of  mysterious  absence  in  the  valley; 
the  path  Marquette  and  Joliet  and  hundreds  after 
them  certainly  took  on  their  way  from  Montreal  to 
the  Mississippi  or  from  the  Mississippi  back  to  Mon- 
treal. You  would  not  know  this  narrow  strip — not  a 
mile  wide — to  be  a  watershed  dividing  the  continent, 
the  north  from  the  south;  you  would  not  know  it  for 
the  threshold  to  the  Mississippi  Valley.  The  plain 
which  the  path  crosses  seems  to  the  eye  as  level  as  a 
table.  Undoubtedly  before  the  tipping  of  the  bed  of 
the  lakes  the  water  flowed  over  this  path.  Indeed, 
La  Salle  in  one  of  his  letters  refers  to  the  portaging 
here  of  canoes  past  an  "oak  grove  and  across  a  flooded 
meadow."  The  tree  of  which  he  speaks,  with  two 
canoes  clumsily  drawn  upon  it  by  the  savages,  to  mark 
the  beginning  of  the  portage  at  the  Wisconsin,  has 
gone,  but  a  monument  of  red  granite  now  stands  there 
with  the  names  of  Marquette  and  Joliet  upon  it.  At 
the  other  end  of  the  now  macadamized  "path"  there 
is  a  little  red  bridge  that  leads  across  the  Fox  to  where 
a  portage  fort  grew  later  into  an  important  trading- 
post;  but  now  there  is  no  trace  of  those  monuments  of 
war  and  trade.  There  is  a  farmhouse  on  their  site  whose 
tenants  are  in  fear  only  of  drought  and  early  frosts. 

1  "  If  the  country  .  .  .  somewhat  resembles  an  earthly  paradise  in  beauty, 
the  way  leading  to  it  may  be  said  to  bear  some  likeness  to  the  one  depicted 
by  our  Lord  as  leading  to  Heaven." — "Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  55  : 
191. 


250    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

A  canal  crosses  this  little  isthmus  and  once  it  inter- 
locked the  east  and  west,  the  arctic  plains  with  the 
subtropic  cane  fields;  but  it  has  given  over  its  work 
to  the  railroads,  having  served,  however,  I  have  no 
doubt,  to  water  the  roots  of  the  beautiful  town  that 
bears  the  generic  name  of  all  those  places  where 
burdens  were  borne  between  waters.  "Wauona,"  the 
Indians  called  it,  more  euphoniously,  but  with  the 
same  significance  as  "Portage" — in  the  State  that  has 
taken  the  name  of  the  river  that  carried  the  burdens 
on  to  the  Mississippi — Wisconsin.  This  town  has 
lately  crept  modestly  into  our  western  literature  as 
"Friendship  Village."1  Except  that  it  has  a  more 
comely  setting  than  most  towns  of  the  plains — even  of 
those  northern  plains  with  their  restful  undulations — 
and  has  a  brighter,  cleaner  aspect — since  a  light- 
colored  brick  is  used  instead  of  the  red  so  much  in 
favor  where  wood  is  forbidden  by  the  fire  laws — it 
is  a  typical  western  town — the  next  size  larger  than 
"Aramoni";  and  so  I  must  stop  here  for  a  moment 
where  Marquette,  son  of  Rose  de  la  Salle  of  Rheims, 
and  Joliet,  the  wagon  maker  of  Quebec,  came  up  out 
of  the  twisting  little  stream  that  is  still  one  of  the 
fountains  of  the  Atlantic. 

For  none  the  less  is  this  village,  standing  beside 
this  fountain  (again  more  euphoniously  called  the  Kaka- 
ling  or  Kaukauna),  itself  touching  the  Atlantic  shores 
and  even  mingling  with  currents  that  reach  the  Euro- 
pean coasts.  There  was  born  in  this  village  the  his- 
torian2 who  has  written  so  well  of  the  rise  of  that 
western  country  that  he  has  been  called  to  the  pro- 

1  Zona  Gale,  "Friendship  Village."    Macmillan,  New  York,  1908. 
*  Frederick  Jackson  Turner. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  251 

fessorship  of  American  history  at  Harvard  University, 
a  literal  son  of  the  portage,  who  has  rediscovered  the 
west  to  the  world.  And  recently  all  the  valley,  and 
other  valleys,  too,  have  been  reading  the  stories  of 
this  place  of  portage  (called,  as  I  have  said,  "  Friend- 
ship Village"),  written  by  a  young  woman  whose  win- 
dows look  out  from  her  home  upon  the  Wisconsin 
River  not  many  paces  from  Marquette's  place  of  em- 
barkation— a  true  daughter  of  the  portage. 

The  French,  who  have  given  the  new  continent  this 
portage  path  out  of  Europe  into  the  very  heart  of 
America,  should  read  with  some  gratification  of  the 
more  intimate  life  that  dwells  there  back  of  and  in 
the  midst  of  the  bustling,  tireless,  noisy  industry  of 
the  valley. 

"The  long  Caledonian  hills"  [the  same  which  La 
Salle  describes],  "the  four  rhythmic  spans  of  the 
bridge"  [a  bridge  of  iron,  not  of  vines  and  flowers  such 
as  Chateaubriand  describes],  "the  nearer  river,  the  is- 
land where  the  first  birds  build — these  teach  our  win- 
dows the  quiet  and  the  opportunity  of  the  home  town, 
its  kindly  brooding  companionship,  its  doors  to  an 
efficiency  as  intimate  as  that  of  fairy  fingers."1  And 
this  is  but  one  of  thousands  of  "home  towns"  in  that 
great  basin,  towns  with  Daphne  streets  and  Queen 
Anne  houses,  and  gloomy  court-houses  and  austere 
churches  and  miniature  libraries,  towns  that  taper  off* 
into  suburban  shanties,  towns  that  have  in  these  new 
bottles,  of  varied  and  pretentious  shapes,  the  best 
wine  of  that  western  world. 

The  author  of  "Friendship  Village"  has  vision  of 
the  more  beautiful  towns  into  which  these  towns  will 

'"Friendship  Village,"  p.  vii,  author's  note. 


252     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

some  day  grow,  as  yours  have  grown  more  beautiful 
with  age.  "All  the  way,"  she  writes,  seeing  the  sun- 
set from  that  same  river  of  the  portage  as  Marquette 
saw  it,  "I  had  been  watching  against  the  gold  the 
jogging  homeward  of  empty  carts.  .  .  .  Such  a  pro- 
cession I  want  to  see  painted  upon  a  sovereign  sky.  I 
want  to  have  painted  a  giant  carpenter  of  the  village 
as  I  once  saw  him,  his  great  bare  arms  upholding  a 
huge  white  pillar,  while  blue  figures  hung  above  and  set 
the  acanthus  capital.  .  .  .  Some  day  we  shall  see  these 
things  in  their  own  surprising  values  and  fresco  our 
village  libraries  with  them."  1  That  appreciation  and 
expression  of  the  beautiful  is  something  that  the  French 
explorers  in  that  other  world — the  valley  reached  of 
the  pioneers  of  the  seeing  eyes  and  the  understanding 
hearts — have  carried  and  will  continue  to  carry  over 
those  same  portages,  to  give  that  virile  life  of  the 
west  some  of  those  higher  satisfactions  of  which  this 
daughter  of  the  portage  is  the  prophetess. 

Another  portage  path  of  importance  is  that  which 
Marquette  may  also  have  trodden,  or  may  even  have 
been  carried  over  by  his  faithful  attendants,  Pierre 
Porteret  and  Jacques,  on  his  death  journey  from  the 
land  of  the  Illinois  to  the  mission  of  Michilimackinac, 
which  he  did  not  reach  alive — a  journey,  the  latter 
part  of  which  was  like  that  of  King  Arthur  borne  in  a 
barge  by  his  faithful  knight,  Sir  Bedivere,  to  his  last 
resting-place,  the  Vale  of  Avalon.  This  portage,  vary- 
ing in  length  with  the  season  from  three  to  five  miles, 
was  the  St.  Joseph-Kankakee  Portage.  La  Salle, 
Tonty,  and  Hennepin  passed  over  it  in  1679  on  a  less 
spiritual  errand  to  the  same  land  whose  inhabitants 

'Zona  Gale,  "Friendship  Village  Love  Stories,"  p.  47. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  253 

Marquette  had  tried  to  instruct  in  the  mystery  of  the 
faith.  And  it  was  well  worn  by  adventurous  and  pious 
feet  in  the  century  that  followed. 

What  traffic  in  temporal  and  spiritual  things  was 
here  carried  over,  is  intimated  by  relics  of  that  cen- 
tury found  in  the  fields  not  far  away,  where  for  many 
years  a  French  mission  house  stood  with  enough  of  a 
military  garrison  to  invite  for  it  the  name  "Fort  St. 
Joseph."  In  the  room  of  the  Northern  Indiana  His- 
torical Society  at  this  portage  there  are  to  be  seen 
some  of  these  relics,  sifted  from  the  dirt  and  sand: 
crucifixes,  knives,  awls,  beads — which  I  am  told  are 
clearly  the  loot  of  ancient  Roman  cities,  traded  to  the 
Indians  for  hides — iron  rings,  nails,  and  hinges — these 
with  flint  arrow-heads  and  axes,  relics  of  the  first  mu- 
nitions of  the  stone  and  iron  ages  out  on  the  edges  of 
civilization. 

This  portage  path  between  the  rivers  is  now  ob- 
literated by  railroads,  paved  streets,  furrows,  graves, 
factories,  and  dwellings;  but  down  by  the  St.  Joseph 
River  there  stands  a  withered  cedar,  perhaps  several 
hundred  years  old,  which  bears  scars  that  are  believed 
to  be  the  blaze  marks  of  the  broad-bladed  axes  of  the 
French  explorers — made  to  indicate  the  place  where 
the  portage  out  of  the  river  began,  the  place  which  La 
Salle  missed  when  lost  in  the  forest  but  afterward 
found,  where  Father  Gabriel  made  several  crosses,  as 
Hennepin  records,  on  the  trees — perhaps  these  very 
marks — and  where  La  Salle  left  letters  for  the  gui- 
dance over  the  prairie  of  those  "who  were  to  come  in 
the  vessel" — thinking  of  the  captain  of  the  Griffin  who 
was  ordered  to  follow  him  to  the  Illinois  on  his  return. 

It  is  only  a  little  more  than  a  league  from  this  land- 


254    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

ing  at  the  bend  of  the  river  (which  has  given  the  name 
"South  Bend"  to  the  town)  across  the  "large  prairie" 
to  the  wet  meadows  in  whose  ooze  the  tortuous  Kan- 
kakee River  became  navigable,  in  La  Salle's  day,  a 
hundred  paces  from  its  source,  and  increased  so  rapidly 
in  volume  that,  as  he  says  in  a  letter,  "in  a  short  time 
it  becomes  as  broad  and  deep  as  the  Marne" — the 
Marne  which  he  knew  in  his  boyhood  and  for  which 
any  but  his  iron  heart  must  have  longed. 

Charlevoix  walked  across  those  unchanged  fields  of 
St.  Joseph  a  half  century  (1674-1720)  after  La  Salle, 
and  Parkman  made  the  same  journey  nearly  a  century 
after  Charlevoix,  finding  there  what  he  called  "a  dirty 
little  town."  To-day  a  clean,  industrious,  eager  city 
of  over  fifty-three  thousand,  with  a  world  horizon,  as 
well  as  a  provincial  pride,  throws  its  shadow  in  the 
early  morning  across  the  path.  Through  its  out- 
skirts I  tried  years  ago  to  trace  this  portage  path  and 
there  with  my  companion  (who  was  always  the  "Tonty" 
of  my  voyages  on  those  western  streams),  put  my  boat 
in  the  river  and  paddled  and  poled  the  seventy-five 
miles  down  the  St.  Joseph  River  to  the  lake,  where, 
as  I  wanted  to  believe,  Marquette  had  made  his  last 
journey.  Hearing,  some  time  after,  of  the  blaze  marks 
on  the  cedar-tree,  I  went  again  to  the  portage,  and 
from  this  old  red  cedar-tree  again  traced  the  probable 
course  of  the  French  to  the  fields  of  corn,  or  maize, 
yellow  in  the  autumn  sun  that  hid  the  fountains  of  the 
Kankakee.  This  time,  having  but  little  leisure,  I  rode  in 
an  automobile  from  one  end  to  the  other  through  and 
along  the  path,  looking  occasionally  toward  the  sky 
for  air-ships  that  were  due  to  alight  there  on  their  way 
from  Chicago  to  New  York. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  255 

In  La  Salle's  packs,  carried  over  that  portage,  were 
blacksmith's  tools — forge,  bellows,  anvil,  iron  for  nails 
— and  carpenter's  and  joiner's  tools.  One  might  easily 
believe  that  they  were  left  there — such  have  been  the 
products  of  that  portage  strip,  two  or  three  miles  wide. 

First,  there  has  grown  there  the  largest  wagon 
factory  in  the  world.  The  path  of  the  pack  and  the 
burden  has  here  produced  as  its  peculiar  contribution 
to  civilization  that  which  is  to  carry  burdens,  instead 
of  the  backs  of  men,  the  world  round. 

Second,  here  stands  the  world's  largest  plough  fac- 
tory— a  place  from  which  ploughs  are  sent  to  every 
arable  valley  that  civilization  has  conquered  and  made 
to  feel  its  hunger. 

Third,  here  spreading  its  acres,  or  arpents,  of  build- 
ings across  the  high  ground  between  the  two  rivers,  is 
the  largest  factory  in  the  world  for  the  making  of  cer- 
tain parts  of  the  sewing-machine;  in  every  community 
of  any  size  in  the  world  it  has  an  agency. 

And  here,  last  of  all,  besides  more  than  a  hundred 
minor  industries,  is  what  is,  to  my  great  surprise,  said 
to  be  the  largest  toy  factory  in  the  world. 

The  gift  of  wagons  for  the  bearing  and  easing  of 
men's  burdens;  the  gift  of  the  steel  plough  that  has 
lifted  man  from  the  primitive  subsistence  of  the  hoe; 
the  gift  of  the  shuttle  which  has  released  woman  from 
the  tyranny  of  the  needle;  the  gift  of  toys  to  the  chil- 
dren of  all  races;  has  not  this  portage  prairie,  this 
meadow  of  St.  Joseph,  had  some  element  mixed  with 
its  loam  and  clay  from  the  spirit  of  those  Gallic 
precursors  of  American  energy,  something  that  has 
given  this  industry  a  wider  venture,  if  not  peculiar 
expression?     At  any  rate,  its  gifts  to  its  time  have 


256    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

been  far  beyond  common,  of  the  tangible  at  least;  and 
as  to  the  intangible,  the  day  that  I  last  spent  on  this 
portage  an  art  league  was  being  formed  to  foster  an 
interest  in  art  and  bring  the  best  examples  available 
to  what  were,  but  a  little  time  ago,  dreary  meadows 
half  covered  with  snow  and  strewn  with  skulls  and 
bones  of  the  buffalo.  The  most  modern  schools  are 
being  developed  and  maintained  by  the  public,  and 
the  University  of  Notre  Dame  and  the  College  of  St. 
Mary  look  across  the  river  to  this  portage  field  and 
city. 

One  might  have  passed  this  portage  so  difficult  to 
discern,  as  La  Salle  did,  and  yet  have  found  another 
way  to  the  lower  Mississippi,  with  a  short  portage 
from  this  same  stream  to  the  Wabash  River.  A  still 
shorter  way  than  any  of  these,  and  doubtless  known  to 
La  Salle  from  his  first  years  of  wanderings  in  the 
eastern  end  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,  led  from  the  west 
end  of  Lake  Erie  up  the  Maumee  and  then  by  portage 
to  the  Wabash  and  the  Ohio.  This  was  the  path  that 
Celoron  followed  homeward  on  his  memorable  plate- 
planting  journey.  But  the  portage  was  so  long  that  he 
burned  his  shattered  canoes  near  the  source  of  the 
Miami  and  was  furnished  with  boats  at  the  French 
fort  near  the  headwaters  of  the  Maumee.  The  hos- 
tility of  the  Iroquois,  as  we  have  seen,  made  perilous 
to  the  French  in  the  earlier  days  this  path,  so  impor- 
tant among  Indian  highways  as  often  to  be  called  the 
"Indian  Appian  Way." 

Excepting  the  portage  paths  farther  up  the  valley, 
notably  that  of  St.  Esprit,  and  important  chiefly  as 
fur-trading  paths,  there  remains  but  one  other  historic 
portage  path  across  the  ridge  of  stone  and  swamp  and 


WESTERN  TOWNS  257 

prairie  from  which  are  pendent,  on  the  one  side,  all  the 
silver  streams  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  and,  on  the 
other  side,  all  the  Great  Lakes  and  all  the  rivers  that 
flow  into  them. 

This  remaining  path  is  the  tenuous  trail  through  the 
fields  of  wild  onions  that  led  from  the  river  or  creek 
called  Chicago  (the  Garlic  River — Riviere  de  l'Ail) 
into  a  stream  that  still  bears  a  French  name  but  of  a 
pronunciation  which  a  Parisian  would  not  accept — 
the  Des  Plaines.  This  path,  too,  traversed  a  marsh 
and  flat  prairie  so  level  that  in  freshet  the  water  ran 
both  ways  and  was  once  in  the  bed  of  a  river  that  ran 
from  the  lake  to  the  gulf.  But  it  has  been  hallowed 
beyond  all  others  of  these  trails,  for  it  was  beside  this 
portage  that  Marquette  suffered  through  a  winter,  de- 
tained there  by  a  serious  sickness  when  on  his  way  to 
minister  to  the  Illinois  Indians  a  hundred  miles  below. 
His  hut  was  the  first  European  habitation  upon  its 
site — the  site  of  the  future  city  of  Chicago. 

In  a  book-shop  not  a  league  from  where  that  hut 
stood  I  found  a  volume  valued  at  its  weight  in  gold1 
giving  the  account  of  the  journey  in  which  Mar- 
quette had  passed  up  this  portage  on  the  way  to  Green 
Bay  after  the  discovery  of  the  upper  Mississippi  with 
Joliet.  It  tells  in  its  closing  paragraphs  of  the  rich 
prairies  just  beyond  this  portage,  but  it  recites  with 
greater  satisfaction  the  baptizing  of  a  dying  child 
brought  to  the  side  of  his  canoe  as  he  was  setting  out 
for  the  mission  house.  "Had  all  this  voyage,"  he  said, 
"caused  but  the  salvation  of  a  single  soul  I  should 

1  Thevenot,  "  Recueil  de  Voyages,"  with  2  folding  maps  and  14  plates, 
complete.  Crown  8vo,  white  pigskin.  Paris  1682.  Contains  Marquette's 
and  Joliet's  Discoveries  in  North  America,  etc.  For  an  account  of  the  vari- 
ous editions,  see  "Jesuit  Relations,"  59  :  294-9. 


258     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

deem  all  my  fatigue  well  repaid,  and  this  I  have  reason 
to  think.  For,  when  I  was  returning,  I  passed  by  the 
Indians  of  Peoria,  where  I  was  three  days  announcing 
the  faith,  in  all  their  cabins,  after  which,  as  we  were 
embarking,  they  brought  me  on  the  water's  edge  a 
dying  child  which  I  baptized  a  little  before  it  expired, 
by  an  admirable  providence,  for  the  salvation  of  an 
innocent  soul."1 

That  was  in  1673.  It  was  more  than  a  year  before 
he  again  entered  the  Chicago  River,  wishing  to  keep 
his  promise  to  minister  to  the  Illinois  savages  and 
eager  "to  do  and  suffer  everything  for  so  glorious  an 
undertaking."  In  the  "Jesuit  Relations"2  the  story 
of  those  winter  days  at  the  Chicago  portage  has  been 
kept  for  all  time.  All  through  January  his  illness 
obliged  him  to  stay  in  the  portage  cabin,  but  early  in 
February  he  "commenced  Novena  (Neufuaine)  with  a 
mass,  at  which  Pierre  and  Jacques  [his  companions], 
who  do  everything  they  can  to  relieve  me,  received  com- 
munion— to  ask  God  to  restore  my  health."  His  ail- 
ment left  him,  but  weakness  and  the  cold  and  the  ice 
in  the  rivers  kept  him  still  at  the  portage  until  April. 
On  the  eve  of  his  leaving  for  the  Illinois  the  journal 
ends  with  this  thoughtful  word  of  the  French:  "If 
the  French  procure  robes  in  this  country,  they  do  not 
disrobe  the  savages,  so  great  are  the  hardships  that 
must  be  endured  to  obtain  them."8 

In  the  dusk  of  an  autumn  day  I  went  out  to  find 
the  place  where  the  Novena  had  worked  the  miracle 
of  his  healing.    As  I  have  already  intimated,  few  of  all 

1  Shea,   "Discovery   and   Exploration  of   the   Mississippi  Valley,"   2d 
ed.,  p.  55. 

2  59:  165-183.  '"Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  59  :  183. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  259 

the  hundreds  of  thousands  there  in  that  great  city 
have  had  any  consciousness  of  the  background  of 
French  heroism  and  suffering  and  prevision  in  front 
of  which  they  were  passing  daily,  but  I  found  that  the 
policemen  and  the  watchmen  on  the  railroad  near  the 
river  knew  at  least  of  the  great  black  cross  which 
stands  by  that  drab  and  sluggish  water,  placed  there 
in  memory  of  Marquette  and  Joliet.  The  bit  of  high 
ground  where  the  hut  stood  is  now  surrounded  by  great 
looming  sheds  and  factories,  which  were  entirely  ten- 
antless  when  I  found  my  way  through  a  long  unlighted 
and  unpaved  street  in  the  direction  of  the  river.  The 
cross  stood,  in  a  little  patch  of  white,  black  as  the 
father's  cowl,  against  the  night  with  its  crescent  moon. 
I  could  not  make  out  the  inscription  on  the  river  side 
of  the  monument  and,  seeing  a  signal-lantern  tied  to  a 
scow  moored  to  the  bank  near  by,  I  untied  it  and  by 
its  light  was  able  to  read  the  tribute  of  the  city  to  the 
memory  of  the  priest  and  the  explorer  "who  first  of 
known  white  men  had  passed  that  way,"  having  trav- 
elled, as  it  recites,  "two  thousand  five  hundred  miles 
in  canoes  in  one  hundred  and  twenty  days."  The 
bronze  plate  bears  a  special  tribute  to  the  foresight 
of  Joliet,  but  it  commemorates  first  of  all  the  dwelling 
of  the  frail  body  and  valorous  soul  of  Father  Marquette, 
the  first  European  within  the  bounds  of  the  city  of 
Chicago.  I  wish  there  might  be  written  on  Missis- 
sippi maps,  in  that  space  that  is  shown  between  the 
Chicago  and  the  Des  Plaines,  or  the  "Divine  River," 
as  it  was  sometimes  called,  the  words:  "Portage  St. 
Jacques."  That  were  a  fitter  canonization  than  to 
put  his  name  among  the  names  of  cities,  steamboats 
on  the  lake,  or  tobaccos,  as  is  our  custom  in  America. 


260     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  crescent  moon  dropped  behind  the  shadows 
that  now  line  the  portage  "like  a  sombre  forest,"  but 
it  is  only  a  few  steps  through  the  darkness  back  into 
the  light  and  noise  of  the  city  of  more  than  two  million 
people. 

Out  of  the  black  loam  of  this  dark  portage  path 
fringed  by  marshes,  in  the  field  of  wild  onions,  the 
newest  of  the  world's  great  cities  has  sprung  and  spread 
with  a  promise  that  exceeds  any  other  on  the  face  of  the 
planet,  though  within  the  life  of  men  still  living  it  was 
but  a  stretch  of  lake  shore,  a  marshy  plain  with  a  path 
from  its  miniature  river  or  creek  toward  the  crescent 
moon. 

A  metropolis  was  doubtless  predestined  on  or  near 
the  very  site  of  Chicago  by  natural  conditions  and  the 
peopling  of  the  lands  to  the  northwest;  but  Louis 
Joliet  was  its  first  prophet.  The  inscription  on  the 
tablet  at  the  foot  of  the  black  cross  recites  that  in 
crossing  this  site  Joliet  recommended  it  for  its  natural 
advantages  and  as  a  place  of  first  settlement.  And 
he  first  suggested  the  lakes-to-the-gulf  waterway — a 
prospect  of  which  La  Salle  speaks  with  disfavor  but 
which  over  two  hundred  years  later  was  in  some 
measure  realized. 

The  "Jesuit  Relation"  of  August  I,  1674,  report- 
ing the  conversation  of  Joliet,  who  had  lost  all  his 
precious  papers  in  the  Lachine  Rapids,  makes  this 
interesting  prophecy:1  "It  would  only  be  necessary  to 
make  a  canal  by  cutting  through  half  a  league  of 
prairie,  to  pass  from  the  foot  of  the  Lake  of  the  Il- 
linois [Michigan]  to  the  River  St.  Louis  [Mississippi]. 
.  .  .    A  bark  [built  on  Lake   Erie]  would  easily  sail 

1  Thwaite's  edition,  58  :  105. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  261 

to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico."  The  monument  to  him  stands 
by  the  canal  that  has  been  cut  through  not  merely  a 
league  but  many  leagues  (thirty-eight  miles)  and  lets 
the  waters  of  Michigan  flow  southward  to  the  Illinois. 
Of  this  site  Joliet  is  quoted  as  saying,  "The  place 
at  which  we  entered  the  lake  is  a  harbor,  very  con- 
venient for  receiving  vessels  and  sheltering  them  from 
the  wind;"1  and  of  the  prairies  back  of  the  harbor: 
"At  first  when  we  were  told  of  these  treeless  lands  I 
imagined  that  it  was  a  country  ravaged  by  fire,  where 
the  soil  was  so  poor  that  it  could  produce  nothing. 
But  we  certainly  observed  the  contrary,  and  no  better 
soil  can  be  found,  either  for  corn,  for  vines,  or  for  any 
fruit  whatever.  ...  A  settler  would  not  there  spend 
ten  years  in  cutting  down  and  burning  the  trees;  on 
the  very  day  of  his  arrival  he  could  put  his  plough 
into  the  ground,  and  if  he  had  no  oxen  from  France, 
he  could  use  those  of  this  country,  or  even  the  animals 
possessed  by  the  western  savages,  on  which  they  ride, 
as  we  do  on  horses.  After  sowing  grain  of  all  kinds, 
he  might  devote  himself  especially  to  planting  the 
vine,  and  grafting  fruit-trees,  to  dressing  ox-hides, 
wherewith  to  make  shoes;  and  with  the  wool  of  these 
oxen  he  could  make  cloth,  much  finer  than  most  of 
that  which  we  bring  from  France.  Thus  he  could 
easily  find  in  the  country  his  food  and  clothing,  and 
nothing  would  be  wanting  except  salt;  but,  as  he  could 
make  provision  for  it,  it  would  not  be  difficult  to 
remedy  that  inconvenience."2  If  Marquette  was  the 
first  martyr  of  the  Illinois,  Joliet  was  the  first  prophet 
of  that  great  city  of  the  Illinois. 

1  "Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  58  :  107. 
'"Jesuit  Relations"  (Thwaites),  58  :  107-9. 


262     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

What  he  could  not  foresee  was  that  Lake  Michigan 
would  make  the  Chicago  of  to-day  not  so  much  by  giv- 
ing it  a  waterway  to  the  markets  of  the  east  and  Eu- 
rope as  by  standing  as  an  obstacle  in  the  way  of  a 
straight  path  to  the  sea  from  the  northwest  fields 
and  so  compelling  those  fertile  lands  to  send  all  their 
riches  around  the  southern  end  of  Lake  Michigan. 
He  overestimated  the  economic  importance,  to  be 
sure,  of  the  buffalo.  But  if  domesticated  cattle  be 
substituted  for  the  wild  species,  he  again  showed  re- 
markable prevision  of  the  future  of  a  city  which  has 
enjoyed  a  world  fame  by  reason  of  its  cattle-market — 
its  stock-yards.1 

Chicago  is  a  city  without  a  past,  save  for  that  glow 
of  adventure  which  is  almost  as  hazy  as  the  myths  or 
legends  that  lie  back  of  Europe.  It  is  just  eighty-one 
years  since  it  came  into  existence  as  a  town,2  and  but 
twenty-eight  voters  voted  for  the  first  board  of  trustees 
of  the  town;  its  population  was  variously  estimated 
at  from  above  two  hundred  to  three  hundred  and  fifty. 
As  a  city,  it  is  seventy-seven  years  old,3  beginning  its 
legal  life  as  such  with  fewer  than  five  thousand  peo- 
ple. It  was  of  its  first  mayor,  William  B.  Ogden — 
though  some  years  later  than  his  administration — that 
Guizot,  looking  upon  the  portrait  of  his  benevolent 
face,  said:  "That  is  the  representative  American,  who 
is  the  benefactor  of  his  country,  especially  the  mighty 
West;  he  built  Chicago."  But  the  Chicago  which  he 
administered  was  but  a  small  town  in  size.  Its  officials 
from  treasurer  to  scavenger  were  appointed  by  the 

1  Of  the  importance  of  the  lakes-to-the-gulf  waterway  we  have  already 
spoken. 

2  August  12,  1833.  3  Chartered  March  4,  1837. 


WESTERN  TOWNS  263 

common  council  and  obliged  to  serve  or  pay  certain 
fines.  Every  male  resident  over  twenty-one  was 
obliged  to  work  three  days  each  year  on  the  streets 
and  alleys  or  pay  one  dollar  for  each  day.  Fire  war- 
dens had  no  compensation  except  release  from  jury  or 
military  service.  There  was  at  first  meagre  school 
provision,1  no  public  sanitary  provision,  no  consider- 
able public  service  of  any  sort.  It  was  a  neighborly 
but  unsocialized  place,  where  the  individual  had  little 
restraint  save  of  his  own  limitations  and  his  personal 
love  of  his  neighbors.  What  social  functions  the  city 
performed  were  self-protective  and  not  self-improving 
in  motive.  For  example,  fire  might  not  be  carried  in 
the  street  except  in  a  fire-proof  vessel.2  The  aboriginal 
frog  croaked  on  the  very  site  of  the  place  where  grand 
opera  is  now  sung. 

The  city's  development  was  largely  left  to  the  hap- 
hazard, unrestrained,  but  whole-souled,  big-hearted, 
self-confident  individualism,  such  as  has  been  potent 
in  Pittsburgh.  The  restrictions  were  mainly  those  of 
the  prohibitory  Mosaic  commandments.  And  so  this 
city,  increasing  its  population  by  a  half-million  in  each 
of  the  last  three  decades,  has  come  to  stand  next 
to  Paris  in  population  and  first  of  all  great  American 
cities  in  the  constructive  activity  of  its  civic  con- 
sciousness and  urban  imagination.  The  city  is  still 
smoke-enwrapped  (when  the  wind  does  not  blow  from 
the  lake);  its  streets  run  out  into  prairie  dust  and  mud; 

1  The  money  derived  from  the  sale  of  school  lands  in  1833  was  distributed 
among  the  existing  private  schools  which  thus  became  free  common  schools. 
Less  than  $40,000  was  received  for  lands  now  worth  much  more  than  $100, 
000,000. 

1 S.  E.  Sparling,  "Municipal  History  and  Present  Organization  of  the 
City  of  Chicago,"  University  of  Wisconsin  Bulletin,  No.  23,  1898. 


264    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

its  harbor,  of  which  Joliet  spoke  in  praise,  merits 
rather  the  disparagement  of  La  Salle;  there  are  offend- 
ing smells  and  sights  everywhere.  But  in  the  midst 
of  it  all  and  over  it  all  is  moving  now,  as  a  healing 
efficacy  in  troubled  waters,  a  spirit  of  democratic 
aspiration.  What  Louis  XIV  or  Napoleon  I  or  Na- 
poleon III,  king  and  emperors,  planned  and  did,  com- 
pelling the  co-operation  of  a  people  in  making  the 
city  of  Paris  more  beautiful,  more  habitable,  that  a 
people  of  millions  out  upon  the  prairies  of  Illinois  are 
beginning  to  do  out  of  their  own  desire  and  common 
treasury. 

It  is  of  interest  that  the  sovereign  of  France  who 
gave  her  empire  of  those  great  stretches  of  plain,  gave 
to  Paris  "those  vast  reaches  of  avenue  and  boulevard 
which  to-day  are  the  crowning  features  of  the  most 
beautiful  of  cities."  But  it  must  quicken  France's  in- 
terest further  to  know  that  this  first  systematic  plan- 
ning for  a  city,  as  an  organic  whole,  by  Louis  XIV  and 
Colbert,  Le  Notre  and  Blondel  is  now  being  followed 
out  on  that  plain  by  a  self-governing  people,  who  have 
been  making  cities  for  barely  half  a  century,  to  bring 
order  and  form  and  beauty,  and  better  condition  of 
living  out  of  that  grimy  collection  of  homes  and 
shops  and  beginnings  of  civic  enterprise  and  great 
private  philanthropies.  A  great  deal  has  been  already 
accomplished,  such  as  the  widening  of  the  leading 
avenue,  the  addition  of  acres  upon  acres  to  the  park 
space  on  the  lake  shore,  the  establishment  of  an  efficient 
small  park  system;  but  it  is  only  the  beginning  of  a 
scheme  that  thinks  of  Chicago  as  a  city  that  will  some 
day  hold  ten  millions  of  people.  The  prophecy  of  one 
statistician  (now  of  New  York)  predicts  for  Chicago  a 


WESTERN  TOWNS  265 

population  of  thirteen  million  two  hundred  and  fifty 
thousand  souls  in  1952;1  and  the  great  railroad  builder, 
James  J.  Hill,  has  estimated  that  "when  the  Pacific 
coast  shall  have  a  population  of  twenty  millions,  Chi- 
cago will  be  the  largest  city  in  the  world." 

The  specific  plans  for  its  improvement  have  been 
developed  by  a  small  body  of  public-spirited  citizens, 
but  they  are  simply  that  great  urban  democracy  think- 
ing and  speaking,  trying  to  express  itself.  It  has  de- 
veloped with  less  interference  or  compulsion  on  the 
part  of  the  State  than  any  other  great  city  of  America, 
and  now  it  is  moving  voluntarily  to  the  noblest  as  well 
as  the  most  practical  of  improvements. 

Under  like  leading  it  built  the  "White  City,"  the 
ephemeral  city  of  the  World's  Fair,  in  the  celebration 
of  the  four-hundredth  anniversary  of  the  discovery  of 
America,  and  that  splendid  achievement  of  the  black, 
unkempt  city  back  of  it  gave  first  hint,  in  the  co-opera- 
tion that  made  this  possible,  of  what  a  community 
could  do  and  at  the  same  time  gathered  to  it  the 
teaching  of  the  older  cities  of  the  earth  from  their  long 
striving  for  the  city  beautiful. 

The  city  provides  its  own  water-supply,  it  lights 
its  streets,  it  has  recently  acquired  control  of  its 
street-car  lines,  and  every  passenger  is  notified  as  a 
shareholder  that  55  per  cent  of  the  profits  comes  into 
the  city  treasury.  And  now  under  this  inspiration 
and  yet  of  its  own  will  it  has  begun  a  transformation 
of  itself  into  the  likeness  of  what  it  dreamed  in  those 
evanescent  buildings  and  courts  and  columns  and 
statues  and  frescoes  out  by  the  opalescent  waters  of 

1  Bion  J.  Arnold,  "Report  of  the  Engineering  and  Operating  Features  of 
the  Chicago  Transportation  Problem,"  pp.  95,  96. 


266     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

its  sea.  It  saw  the  reflection  of  that  "White  City"  in 
the  lake  and  then  the  image  of  its  own  workaday 
face — and  it  has  not  forgotten  what  manner  of  city  it 
was. 

Remember  again  that  what  is  and  what  is  promised 
have  come  in  a  lifetime.  Walking  in  the  streets  of  that 
city  early  one  morning  a  few  years  ago,  as  the  trains 
were  emptying  the  throngs  who  sleep  outside  along  the 
lake  and  out  on  the  prairie,  into  the  canyons  made  by 
its  tall  buildings,  I  found  myself  immediately  behind  a 
robust  old  man,  a  civil  engineer,  who  was  born  before 
Chicago  had  a  hundred  inhabitants.  He  was  much 
older  than  the  city  whose  buildings  now  reach  out 
miles  from  the  lake  (one  of  its  streets  thirty-two  miles 
long)  and  thirty  and  forty  stories  into  the  air.  One 
hundred  years  ago  it  was  the  French  wilderness  un- 
touched. Eighty  years  ago  most  of  its  citizens  bore 
French  names.  The  portage  path  has  literally  yielded 
a  harvest  of  streets. 

Chicago,  the  city  of  the  French  portage,  Chicago, 
which  despite  all  that  casual  visitors  see  and  say  of 
it,  was,  I  contend,  best  defined  by  Harriet  Martineau 
as  a  "great,  embryo  poet,"  moody,  wild,  but  bringing 
about  results,  exulting  that  he — for  he  is  a  masculine 
poet — has  caught  the  true  spirit  of  things  of  the  past 
and  has  had  sight  of  the  depths  of  futurity.  But  it  is 
only  now  that  the  brooding  poet  is  coming  to  express 
himself  in  verses  that  are  recognized  for  their  beauty. 

Chicago,  the  field  of  the  wild  onions,  threaded  by 
La  Riviere  de  l'Ail,  the  place  of  the  shambles,  the 
capital  of  the  golden  calf.     That  is  her  fame. 

Only  recently  I  read  in  a  book  which  I  found  in 
Paris,  written  by  an  English  traveller,  that  Chicago 


WESTERN  TOWNS  267 

stands  apart  from  all  other  cities  in  that  "her  people 
are  really  on  earth  to  make  money";  that,  magnificent 
as  she  is  in  many  ways,  chiefly  in  distances,  she  is  "too 
busy  money-making  to  attend  to  civic  improvements" 
or  to  have  a  "keen  affection  for  worthier  things." 

I  have  gone  a  hundred  times  in  and  out  of  that 
dirty,  unkempt  city,  swept  only  by  the  winds,  one  would 
think,  and  I  know  its  worst,  its  physical,  moral, 
political  worst.  But  if  the  people  there  have  wor- 
shipped the  golden  calf  in  their  wilderness,  they  have 
now  drunk  of  the  dust  of  their  first  image,  and  I  should 
be  disposed  to  say  that  nowhere  among  American 
cities  is  there  a  keener  affection  for  worthier  things 
showing  itself. 

Again  I  shall  have  to  admit  that  this  "affection" 
is  not  the  spontaneous  expression  of  the  entire  demo- 
cratic community.  As  in  Pittsburgh,  a  comparatively 
few  men  have  voluntarily,  and  at  their  own  expense, 
undertaken  to  study  not  only  the  conditions  that  make 
for  better  and  cheaper  travel,  more  profitable  com- 
mercial intercourse  and  greater  productiveness,  but 
for  a  more  wholesome  and  a  higher  spiritual  existence. 
And  again  it  is  so  with  the  hope  that  the  great  self- 
governing  community  will  out  of  its  desire  and  treasury 
bring  about  these  conditions. 

These  few  men  and  women,  possessed  both  by  a  love 
of  that  still  uncouth  city  and  an  ideal  objectively 
learned  in  the  days  when  the  "White  City"  stood  be- 
tween it  and  the  lakes,  have  already  spent  a  half- 
million  francs  in  study  and  in  making  plans — in  ad- 
dition to  all  the  months  and  years  of  volunteer,  unpaid 
service. 

The  principal  items  of  this  great  scheme  are: 


268     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

i.  The  improvement  of  the  lake  front. 

2.  The  creation  of  a  system  of  highways  outside  the 
city. 

3.  The  improvement  of  railway  terminals  and  the 
development  of  a  complete  traction  system  for  both 
freight  and  passengers. 

4.  The  acquisition  of  an  outer  park  system  and  of 
parkway  circuits. 

5.  The  systematic  arrangement  of  the  streets  and 
avenues  within  the  city,  in  order  to  facilitate  the  move- 
ment to  and  from  the  business  districts. 

6.  The  development  of  centres  of  intellectual  life 
and  of  civic  administration,  so  related  as  to  give  co- 
herence and  unity  to  the  city. 

Is  there  not  hope  for  democracy  if  in  the  places  of 
its  greatest  strain  and  stress,  in  the  midst  of  its  fiercest 
passions,  there  is  a  deliberate,  affectionate,  intelligent 
striving  toward  cities  that  have  been  revealed  not  in 
apocalyptic  vision  but  in  the  long-studied  plans  of 
terrestrial  architects  and  engineers  and  altruistic  souls, 
such  as  that  of  Jane  Addams,  cities  that  to  such  am- 
phionic  music  shall  out  of  the  shards  of  the  past  build 
themselves  silently,  impregnably — if  not  in  a  diviner 
clime,  at  any  rate  in  a  diviner  spirit — on  shores  and 
slopes  and  plains  of  that  broad  valley  of  the  new 
democracy,  conterminous  in  its  mountain  boundaries 
with  New  France  in  America  ? 

A  little  while  ago  some  workmen  who  were  digging 
trenches  for  the  foundations  of  a  new  factory  or  ware- 
house along  that  portage  path  thrust  their  spades  into 
a  piece  of  wood  buried  sixteen  feet  below  the  surface. 
It  was  found  to  be  a  fragment  of  a  French  bateau, 
lying  on  one  of  whose  thwarts  was  a  sword — probably 


WESTERN  TOWNS  269 

of  one  who  had  met  his  death  on  the  edge  of  the  por- 
tage— a  sword  with  an  inscription  showing  that  it 
probably  belonged  to  an  early  French  voyageur. 

And  so  again  in  these  relics  but  newly  brought  to 
light  I  find  new  words  to  remind  ourselves  that  the 
roots  of  that  mighty,  virile,  healthiest,  most  aspiring 
of  America's  great  cities  are  entwined  about  the  sym- 
bols of  French  adventure  and  empire  in  the  west — 
the  sword  and  the  boat,  and  doubtless  there  was  a 
crucifix  not  far  away. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN 

IONCE  heard  a  public  lecturer  in  America  telling 
a  New  York  audience  of  an  experience  in  the  Mis- 
sissippi Valley,  where  he  asked  an  audience  of 
children  what  body  of  water  lay  in  the  middle  of  the 
earth — wishing  them  to  name  to  him,  of  course,  the 
Mediterranean  Ocean — and  unexpectedly  got  the  seri- 
ous answer  from  a  lad  of  deep  conviction  but  narrow 
horizon,  "the  Sangamon  River."  I  told  the  amused 
lecturer,  who  had  never  heard  of  this  river,  at  any  rate 
as  locally  pronounced,  that  the  lad  spoke  more  truly 
than  the  lecturer  knew.  For  to  those  of  even  wider 
horizons,  whose  greatest  and  most  beloved  hero  in  his- 
tory lived  and  was  buried  near  the  banks  of  the  Sanga- 
mon, it  is  the  middle  water  of  the  earth. 

It  is  but  a  little  river,  and  it  is  but  one  of  the  rivers 
of  the  valley  of  a  hundred  thousand  streams,  truly 
the  Medimarenean  Land,  since  all  the  oceans  are  now 
being  gathered  about  it.  The  Sangamon  flows  into 
the  Illinois,  the  Illinois  into  the  Mississippi,  and  the 
Mississippi  is  now  to  flow  into  all  the  seas,  even  as  the 
life  of  Lincoln  is  to  flow  into  all  history. 

How  little  competent  I  am  to  speak  dispassionately 
of  this  great  incarnation  of  the  spirit  of  those  western 
waters  the  distorted  geography  of  the  untravelled  lad 
whom  the  alien  lecturer  found  on  the  prairies  will 
suggest,  for  the  river  of  the  home  and  the  fame  of  Lin- 
coln empties  into  the  river  of  my  birth. 

270 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     271 

It  was  along  this  latter  river — the  Illinois — as  we 
know,  that  La  Salle  and  his  men,  in  midwinter  of  1682, 
dragged  on  the  ice  their  canoes,  baggage,  and  disabled 
companions  from  the  Chicago  River,  all  the  way  to  the 
site  of  Fort  Crevecceur,  where  they  found  open  water, 
and  thence  in  their  canoes  made  their  way  past  the 
mouth  of  the  Sangamon  (which  first  appears  on  the 
maps  of  the  new  world  in  1683,  just  after  La  Salle's 
journey,  as  the  River  Emicouen)  and  on  into  the  Mis- 
sissippi. We  recall  their  "adventurous  progress"  and 
the  unveiling  to  their  eyes  more  and  more  of  the  vast 
new  world,  where  the  warm  and  drowsy  air  and  hazy 
sunlight  succeeded  the  frosty  breath  of  the  north.  We 
see  them  floating  down  the  winding  water  path.  We 
see  the  red  children  of  the  sun — the  Indian  sun-wor- 
shippers— clothed  in  white  cloaks,  receiving  the  white 
heralds  of  Europe;  we  hear  the  weather-beaten  voy- 
ageurs  chant  on  the  shores  of  the  gulf  solemn,  exulting 
songs  learned  in  church  and  cloister  of  France;  we 
hear  the  faint  voice  of  their  leader  crying  his  claim  to 
all  the  great  valley  from  the  mouth  of  the  river  to  its 
source  beyond  the  country  of  the  Nadouesioux — the 
voice  not  of  a  human  throat  alone  but  of  a  vision  in 
the  wilderness.  We  discern  after  long  years  the 
sounds  of  its  realization.  We  see  the  iridescence  of  the 
John  Law  bubble  shining  over  the  turbid  waters  of 
that  river  for  a  moment.  We  see  the  raising  and  lower- 
ing of  flags  of  various  colors.  We  hear  Napoleon's  rep- 
resentative saying:  "May  the  inhabitants  of  this  valley 
and  a  Frenchman  never  meet  upon  any  spot  of  the 
globe  without  feeling  brothers!"  We  see  the  general 
who  is  later  to  embody  the  west's  crude  democratic 
ideals,  Andrew  Jackson,  victorious  in  the  last  struggle 


272     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

of  independence  from  Europe.  We  see  the  red  wor- 
shippers of  the  sun  in  their  white  cloaks  crossing  the 
river,  vanishing  toward  its  setting;  and  we  see  the 
black  shadows  of  men,  the  negro  slaves,  creeping  out 
of  Africa  after  the  white  heralds  of  Europe  in  America. 
Seeing  and  hearing  all  this,  we  have  seen  and  heard 
the  intimations  of  the  glory  of  France  in  the  new 
world,  the  birth  of  a  world-power,  the  United  States, 
the  infancy  of  a  new  democracy,  the  disappearance  of 
the  aboriginal  Indian,  the  menace  of  the  black  shadow 
that  had  made  a  nation  half  slave  and  half  free,  and 
the  prophecy  of  the  triumphant  coming  of  the  new-age 
producers  and  poets,  the  men  of  the  Land  of  the  Western 
Waters. 

It  is  out  of  this  light  and  shade  gathered  by  the 
Father  of  Waters — the  Mississippi — along  its  banks, 
that  there  comes  silently  one  day  in  183 1,  the  lank, 
bony,  awkward  figure  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  then  a 
young  man  of  twenty-two,  guiding  a  flatboat  laden 
with  prairie  products  down  this  same  tortuous  water- 
way, from  the  Sangamon  to  the  sea.  He  was  six  feet 
four  inches  tall,  homely,  sad-faced,  handy,  and  as 
little  promising  outwardly  as  any  other  pilot  or  boat- 
man of  those  days.  It  is  still  remembered  in  prairie 
legends,  however,  that  at  the  beginning  of  the  voyage, 
his  boat  being  stuck  midway  across  a  dam,  he  had  in- 
geniously managed  to  release  it  and  save  all  from 
shipwreck.  It  seems  now  an  incident  fraught  with 
prophecy.  And  it  is  said  that  many  years  later  he 
made  designs  of  a  contrivance  that  would  lift  flatboats 
over  shoals  and  even  let  them  navigate  on  ice — an 
intimation  of  the  resourcefulness  of  men  left  to  fight 
alone  with  the  forces  of  nature. 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     273 

He  was  not  a  "Yankee,"  as  one  writing  me  in  Paris 
characterized  the  men  of  that  valley.  This  awkward 
landsman  on  water  was  born  in  a  cabin  in  the  Ken- 
tucky wilderness,  a  house  replaced  by  one  of  unhewn 
timber,  without  door  or  floor  or  window,  probably  not 
better  than  the  meanest  of  the  gypsy  houses  just  out- 
side the  fortifications  of  Paris.  He  accompanied  his 
restless,  migratory  father  from  one  squatter  home  to 
another  until  he  settled  in  Illinois,  where  the  timber- 
land  and  prairie  meet,  near  the  Sangamon,  and  there 
built  another  cabin,  made  rails  to  fence  ten  acres  of 
land — which  gave  him  the  sobriquet  the  "rail-split- 
ter"— "broke"  the  ground,  and  raised  a  crop  of  corn 
on  it  the  first  year.  You  may  remember  that  Joliet 
made  report  of  such  a  possibility  there. 

Lincoln's  origin  you  will  recognize  as  typical  of  that 
frontier,  except  that  the  character  which  asserted 
itself  in  the  son,  if  there  is  transmission  of  acquired 
character,  seems  to  have  come  from  the  mother  and 
the  nurturing  of  his  stepmother  rather  than  from  the 
shiftless,  paternal  pioneer  who  gave  the  wilderness 
environment  and  soil  to  the  nurturing  of  this  stock 
and  was  as  little  paternalistic  as  the  government. 
Perhaps  this  ne'er-do-well  father  is  to  be  classed  as 
one  of  those  rough  coureurs  de  bois  who,  in  his  am- 
bassadorship from  his  ancestors  to  their  frontier  pos- 
terity, forgot  the  conventions  and  manners  of  the  an- 
cestral life  in  the  temptations  of  the  open  country  to  a 
man  without  a  slave.  When  he  started  down  the  Ohio 
into  Indiana  with  his  family,  his  carpenter's  tools,  his 
household  goods,  and  a  considerable  quantity  of 
whiskey,  he  was  going  to  treat,  not  as  the  coureurs  de 
bois,  with  the  Indians,  the  savage  men  of  the  forests; 


274     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

he  was  going  to  treat  with  the  savage  forces  of  nature 
themselves.  And  one  must,  as  I  have  said  of  Nicolet 
and  Perrot  and  Du  Lhut,  judge  charitably  these  men 
who  made  the  reconciliations  of  the  edges  of  things. 
They  made  the  paths  to  western  cities;  he,  to  a  west- 
ern character;  that  only  need  be  remembered. 

Certain  trees  depend  for  the  spread  of  their  kind  on 
seeds  equipped  with  spiral  wings  that  when  they  fall 
they  may  reach  the  ground  outside  the  shadow  of  the 
parent  tree  and  so  have  a  chance  to  grow  into  wide- 
spreading  trees.  Thomas  Lincoln,  the  father  of  Abra- 
ham, was  as  the  spirals  that  carried  the  precious  seed 
where  it  could  have  free  air  and  an  unshadowed  soil 
to  grow  in. 

And  there  the  tuition  of  the  experiences  that  made 
all  men  kin  and  so  made  a  natural  democracy  possible 
began.  He  had  little  teaching  of  the  formal  sort. 
Six  months  or  a  year  in  a  log  schoolhouse  probably 
measured  its  duration.  He  had  the  sterner  discipline 
of  the  fields,  the  waters,  and  the  trees,  for  their  very 
temptations  became  disciplines  to  those  who  resisted, 
as  his  father  did  not.  He  learned  his  parables  of  the 
fields  and  of  the  natural  instincts  of  his  neighbors. 
He  knew  both  physical  and  human  nature  about  him, 
and  this  he  illustrated,  expressed,  in  such  manner  as 
to  make  him  a  faithful  and  favorite  exponent  of  its 
coarseness,  its  kindliness,  its  gallantry,  its  sympathies, 
and  its  heroisms. 

These  neighborly  fellowships,  not  affected  but  genu- 
ine, equipped  him  not  only  with  a  vital  and  never-fail- 
ing sense  of  brotherhood  but  with  a  faith  in  those 
whom  he  called  the  "plain  people,"  the  common  man. 
His  creed  was,  if  not  innate,  innurtured.    That  fellow- 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     275 

ship  and  that  faith  were  at  the  bottom  of  his  democracy 
— not  merely  patient  love  of  his  neighbors  but  faith 
in  their  ultimate  judgments — democracy  that  made  him 
a  nationalist  and  a  world  humanist. 

But  in  the  making  of  Lincoln  there  were  more  than 
the  usual  disciplines.  He  had  also  the  tuition  of  the 
"solemn  solitude,"  as  Bancroft  says.  He  sought  the 
fellowships  of  the  past — of  that  "invisible  multitude 
of  the  spirits  of  yesterday."  He  read  every  book  that 
he  could  get  within  fifty  miles,  it  is  said.  But  what  is 
more  certain  is  that  he  read  thoroughly  and  "inwardly 
digested"  a  few  books.  He  knew  the  Bible,  Shake- 
speare, and  Burns,  iEsop's  "Fables,"  Bunyan's  "Pil- 
grim's Progress,"  and  "Robinson  Crusoe."  He  read  a 
history  of  the  United  States  and  a  life  of  Washington, 
and  he  learned  by  heart  the  statutes  of  the  State  of  In- 
diana. Moreover,  he  studied  without  guidance  algebra 
and  geometry.  It  is  said  that  later  in  life,  when  his 
political  career  was  beginning,  he  continued  his  studies 
even  more  seriously  and  attempted  to  master  a  foreign 
language. 

So  he  had  companionship  of  the  patriarchs  and 
prophets  and  poets  of  Israel.  And  it  was  the  experi- 
ence of  many  another  prairie  boy  that  he  knew  inti- 
mately these  Asiatic  heroes  of  history  before  he  con- 
sciously heard  of  modern  or  contemporary  heroes.  I 
knew  of  Joshua  before  I  was  aware  of  Napoleon,  and  I 
remember  carving  upon  a  primitive  arch  of  triumph — 
which  was  only  the  stoop  at  the  roadside,  but  the  most, 
conspicuous  public  place  accessible  to  my  knife — the 
name  of  one  of  the  cities  taken  in  the  conquest  of 
Canaan,  an  instinct  of  hero-worship — so  splendidly  il- 
lustrated in  French  art  and  monuments. 


276    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Lincoln  the  youth  had  not  only  those  ancient  com- 
panionships but  the  intimate  counsel  of  the  greatest 
of  teachers  of  democracy.  He  knew,  too,  the  homely 
wisdom  of  Greece  as  well  as  he  knew  the  treasured 
sayings  of  his  own  people  handed  on  from  generation  to 
generation.  He  was  as  familiar  with  the  larger-hori- 
zoned  gossip  and  philosophies  of  Shakespeare's  plays  as 
with  those  which  gathered  around  the  post-office  of 
Clary's  Grove,  where  later  this  youth  as  postmaster 
carried  the  letters  in  his  hat  and  read  the  newspapers 
before  they  were  delivered.  He  loved  Burns  for  his 
philosophy  that  "a  man's  a  man  for  a'  that."  So  with 
these  and  others  he  found  his  high  fellowships,  even 
while  he  "swapped"  stories  (enriched  of  his  reading) 
with  his  neighbors  at  the  store  or  his  fellow  lawyers 
at  the  primitive  taverns. 

But  there  were  less  personal  associations.  He  made 
the  fundamental  laws  of  a  wilderness  State  an  acquisi- 
tion of  his  instincts.  There  is  preserved  in  a  law 
library  in  New  York  the  much-worn  copy  of  the 
statutes  of  Indiana  enacted  in  the  first  years  of  the 
existence  of  that  State.  It  is  stated  that  he  learned 
these  statutes  by  copying  extracts  from  them — and 
from  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  the  Constitution 
of  the  United  States,  and  the  Ordinance  of  the  North- 
west, included  in  the  same  volume — on  a  shingle  when 
paper  was  scarce,  using  ink  made  of  the  juice  of  brier- 
root  and  a  pen  made  from  the  quill  of  a  turkey-buz- 
zard, and  shaving  the  shingle  clean  for  another  extract 
when  one  was  learned,  till  his  primitive  palimpsest 
was  worn  out.  But  whatever  the  medium  of  their 
transmigration  from  matter  to  mind,  they  became  the 
law  of  his  democracy,  sacred  as  if  they  had  been  brought 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     277 

to  him  on  tables  of  stone  by  a  prophet  with  shining 
face.  It  was  in  that  school,  I  believe,  that  he  learned 
his  nationalism,  his  devotion  to  the  Constitution — to 
which  in  maturer  years  he  gave  this  famed  expres- 
sion: "I  would  save  the  Union,  I  would  save  it  in  the 
shortest  way  under  the  Constitution.  .  .  .  My  par- 
amount object  in  this  struggle  is  to  save  the  Union. 
If  I  could  save  the  Union  without  freeing  any  slave  I 
would  do  it;  and  if  I  could  save  it  by  freeing  all  the 
slaves,  I  would  do  it;  and  if  I  could  save  it  by  freeing 
some  and  leaving  others  alone,  I  would  also  do  that. 
What  I  do  about  slavery  and  the  colored  race,  I  do 
because  I  believe  it  helps  to  save  the  Union,  and  what 
I  forbear,  I  forbear  because  I  do  not  believe  it  would 
help  to  save  the  Union."1 

And  when  he  had  freed  the  negro  by  a  proclamation 
that  violated  the  letter  of  the  Constitution,  it  was 
still  that  boy  of  the  woods  speaking  in  the  man — the 
boy  who  had  learned  his  lesson  beyond  all  possibility 
of  forgetting  or  misunderstanding — "I  felt  that  mea- 
sures otherwise  unconstitutional  mighf  become  lawful 
by  becoming  indispensable  to  the  preservation  of  the 
Constitution  through  the  preservation  of  the  nation." 

It  was  from  those  shingles  that  he  learned,  too,  the 
place  of  the  State  in  this  nationalism.  Its  paternalism 
has  grown  tremendously  since  1824,  when  democracy 
was  a  negative,  a  repressive  and  not  a  positive,  aggres- 
sive political  and  social  spirit,  but,  as  it  was,  it  gave 
him  the  foundation  of  the  political  structure  within 
whose  lines  he  had  to  build  later. 

And  with  all  this  was  a  self-discipline  in  the  two 
great  knowledges  by  which  men  have  climbed  from 

1  Letter  to  Horace  Greeley,  August  22,  1862. 


278     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

savages  to  gods — language  and  mathematics.  He  was 
told  one  day  that  there  was  an  English  grammar  in  a 
house  six  miles  from  his  home,  and  he  at  once  walked 
off  to  borrow  it.  And  he  studied  geometry  and  algebra 
alone.  This  may  seem  to  you  an  inconsequential  thing, 
but  having  myself  on  those  same  prairies  not  far  away 
from  the  Sangamon  acquired  my  algebra  with  little 
teaching  and  my  solid  geometry  with  only  the  tuition 
of  a  book  and  of  the  sun  or  a  lamp,  I  am  able  to  ap- 
preciate what  the  hardship  of  that  self-schooling  was. 
It  was  more  agreeable  to  watch  the  clouds  while  the 
horses  rested  at  the  end  of  the  furrow,  to  address,  as 
did  Burns,  lines  to  a  field-mouse,  or  to  listen  to  the  song 
of  the  meadow-lark,  than  to  learn  the  habits  of  the  three 
dimensions  then  known,  of  points  in  motion,  of  lines 
in  intersection,  of  surfaces  in  revolution,  or  to  represent 
the  unknown  by  algebraic  instead  of  poetic  symbols. 

But  his  private  personal  culture,  as  one1  has  observed, 
had  no  "embarrassing  effects,"  because  he  shared  so 
completely  and  genuinely  the  amusements  and  occupa- 
tions of  his  neighborhood.  No  "taint  of  bookishness" 
disturbed  the  local  fellowships  which  gave  him  opportu- 
nity to  express  in  "familiar  and  dramatic  form"  of 
story  and  illustration  his  more  substantial  philosophy 
and  so  find  for  it  the  perfect  speech.  His  neighbors 
called  him  by  homely,  affectionate  names,  thinking  he 
was  entirely  one  of  them — a  little  more  clever,  a  little 
less  ambitious  in  the  usual  channels  of  business  and 
enterprise.  He  had  no  "moral  strenuousness  of  the 
reformer"  and  no  "exclusiveness"  of  learning.  He 
"accepted  the  fabric  of  traditional  American  political 

1  Herbert  Croly,  Lincoln  as  more  than  an  American  in  his  "Promise  of 
American  Life,"  pp.  89-99. 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     279 

thought."  He  seemed  "but  the  average  product," 
and  yet,  as  this  same  writer  has  said,  "at  bottom  Abra- 
ham Lincoln  differed  as  essentially  from  the  ordinary 
western  American  of  the  middle  period  as  St.  Francis 
of  Assisi  differed  from  the  ordinary  Benedictine  monk 
of  the  thirteenth  century."1  He  was  not,  like  Jackson, 
simply  a  lar'ge,  forceful  version  of  the  plain  American 
trans-Alleghany  citizen;  he  made  no  clamorous,  boast- 
ful show  of  strength,  powerful  as  he  was  physically  and 
intellectually.  He  shared  genuinely,  with  no  conscious- 
ness of  his  own  distinction,  the  "good-fellowship  of 
his  neighbors,  their  strength  of  will,  their  excellent 
faith,  and  above  all  their  innocence."  But  he  made 
himself,  by  discipline  of  his  own,  "intellectually  candid, 
concentrated,  and  disinterested  and  morally  humane, 
magnanimous  and  humble."  This  is  not  the  picture 
of  a  conventional,  generic  democrat;  and  this  is  not, 
we  are  assured  by  the  earlier  writers,  the  picture  of  the 
westerner  of  that  period.  Indeed,  Mr.  Croly  insists 
that  while  these  Lincolnian  qualities  are  precisely  the 
qualities  which  Americans,  in  order  to  become  better 
democrats,  should  add  to  their  strength,  homogeneity, 
and  innocence,  they  are  just  the  qualities  (high  intelli- 
gence, humanity,  magnanimity,  and  humility)  which 
Americans  are  "prevented  by  their  individualistic 
practice  and  tradition  from  attaining  or  properly  valu- 
ing." "Their  deepest  convictions,"  he  contends, 
"make  the  average  unintelligent  man  the  representa- 
tive democrat,  and  the  aggressive,  successful  individual 
the  admired  national  type."  To  them  Lincoln  is 
simply  "a  man  of  the  people"  and  an  example  of 
strong  will. 

1  Croly,  "Promise  of  American  Life,"  p.  90. 


280    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

But  the  man  who  said  this  did  not  know  that  land 
of  Lincoln — which  was  the  valley  of  La  Salle,  and  even 
before  that  the  valley  of  the  tribe  of  men — for  I  be- 
lieve its  inhabitants  knew  that  he  was  the  embodiment 
of  what  they  coveted  for  themselves;  that  he  was  not 
their  ordinary  average  but  their  best  selves. 

Their  individualism  has  been,  I  must  say  again, 
under  practical  compulsions  and  has  had  fruits  that 
deceive  the  eye.  It  is  so  insistent  upon  national  pro- 
ductivity, but  none  the  less  is  it  joined  to  a  high  ideal- 
ism that  worships  just  the  qualities  that  were  so 
miraculously  united  in  Abraham  Lincoln.  To  be  sure, 
some  remember  for  their  own  excuse  his  coarse  stories; 
some  recall  for  their  own  justification  his  acceptance 
of  the  political  standards  that  he  found;  but  the  great 
body  of  the  people  keep  him  in  reverence  and  affection 
as  the  incarnation  of  patience,  honesty,  fairness, 
magnanimity,  humility;  not  for  his  strength  of  will 
primarily,  but  for  his  strength  of  charity  and  honesty, 
and  in  so  doing  they  reveal  the  ideal  that  is  in  and 
under  their  own  individual  struggle. 

Montalembert  said  that  "a  social  constitution  which 
produced  a  Lincoln  and  others  like  him  is  a  good  tree 
whose  sure  fruit  leaves  nothing  to  envy  in  the  product 
of  any  monarchy  or  aristocracy."  Lincoln  was  not, 
we  want  to  believe,  a  freak,  a  sport  of  nature,  but  the 
"sure  fruit"  that  should  not  only  leave  nothing  to 
envy  in  others,  but  leave  nothing  to  question  in  the 
soundness  of  a  democracy  that  gives  evidence  of  its 
spirit  in  remembering  Abraham  Lincoln  more  tenderly, 
more  affectionately,  more  reverentially  than  any  one 
else  in  its  history.  It  is  less  to  his  praise  but  more 
accurate,  I  think,  that,  as  his  biographer  put  it:  "His 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     281 

day  and  generation  uttered  itself  through  him."  He 
expressed  their  ugliest  forms  and  their  most  beautiful 
developments. 

None  the  less  is  it  remarkable  that  not  only  should 
the  virility  and  nobility  of  the  frontier  have  been  ex- 
hibited in  him,  but  that  the  consummate  skill  and  char- 
acter known  to  the  world's  centres  of  culture  should 
have  had,  in  his  speech  and  intellectual  attitude  and 
grasp,  a  new  example. 

When  he  wrote  his  letter  in  acceptance  of  the  nomi- 
nation to  the  presidency,  he  showed  it  to  the  superin- 
tendent of  public  instruction  in  Illinois,  whom  he 
called  "Mr.  Schoolmaster"  (and  who  was  years  after 
my  own  beloved  schoolmaster)  saying:  "I  am  not  very 
strong  on  grammar  and  I  wish  you  would  see  if  it  is 
all  right."  The  schoolmaster  had  only  to  repair  what 
we  call  a  "split  infinitive."  But  the  great  utterances 
of  his  life  had  no  tuition  or  revision  of  schoolmasters. 
They  were  his  own  in  conception  and  expression.  He 
sent  his  Cooper  Union  speech  in  advance  to  several  for 
advice,  and  they,  I  am  told,  changed  not  a  word. 

Of  his  debates  with  Douglas  (1858),  his  speech  in 
Cooper  Union,  New  York,  i860,  his  oration  at  the 
dedication  of  the  Soldiers'  Cemetery  at  Gettysburg, 
and  of  his  second  inaugural  address,  it  has  been  said 
that  no  one  of  them  has  been  surpassed  in  its  separate 
field.  Goldwin  Smith  said  of  the  Gettysburg  speech: 
"Saving  one  very  flat  expression,  the  address  has  no 
superior  in  literature."1  These  appraisements  I  would 
hesitate  to  repeat  in  France,  where  all  letters  come 
finally  to  be  adjudged,  if  I  did  not  know  that  this  last 

1  Goldwin  Smith,  "Early  Years  of  A.  Lincoln."  In  R.  D.  Sheppard, 
"Abraham  Lincoln,"  p.  132. 


282     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

document  (the  Gettysburg  speech),  at  least,  had  been 
admitted  to  the  seat  of  the  immortal  classics.  It  is  said 
to  have  been  written  on  scraps  of  paper,  as  the  great 
care-worn  man  rode  in  the  car  from  Washington  to 
Gettysburg,  and  I  have  been  told  by  one  who  was 
present  at  the  ceremonies  that  the  quiet  had  hardly 
come  over  the  vast  audience,  stirred  by  the  eloquence 
of  Edward  Everett's  oration  which  had  lasted  two 
hours,  before  this  briefest  and  noblest  of  American 
orations,  spoken  in  a  high  and  unmusical  voice  by  the 
great  lank  figure,  consulting  his  manuscript,  was  over. 
It  is  heard  now  in  the  memory  of  millions  of  school- 
children from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Pacific: 

"Fourscore  and  seven  years  ago  our  fathers  brought 
forth  on  this  continent  a  new  nation,  conceived  in 
liberty  and  dedicated  to  the  proposition  that  all  men 
are  created  equal. 

"Now  we  are  engaged  in  a  great  civil  war,  testing 
whether  that  nation  or  any  nation  so  conceived  and  so 
dedicated,  can  long  endure.  We  are  met  on  a  great 
battle-field  of  that  war.  We  have  come  to  dedicate  a 
portion  of  that  field  as  a  final  resting-place  for  those 
who  here  gave  their  lives  that  that  nation  might  live. 
It  is  altogether  fitting  and  proper  that  we  should  do 
this. 

"But  in  a  larger  sense,  we  cannot  dedicate — we  can- 
not consecrate — we  cannot  hallow — this  ground.  The 
brave  men,  living  and  dead,  who  struggled  here  have 
consecrated  it  far  beyond  our  poor  power  to  add  or 
detract.  The  world  will  little  note  nor  long  remember 
what  we  say  here,  but  it  can  never  forget  what  they  did 
here.  It  is  for  us,  the  living,  rather,  to  be  dedicated 
here  to  the  unfinished  work,  which  they  who  fought 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     283 

here  have  thus  far  so  nobly  advanced.  It  is  rather  for 
us  to  be  here  dedicated  to  the  great  task  remaining 
before  us — that  from  these  honored  dead  we  take  in- 
creased devotion  to  that  cause  for  which  they  gave  the 
last  full  measure  of  devotion;  that  we  here  highly 
resolve  that  these  dead  shall  not  have  died  in  vain; 
that  this  nation,  under  God,  shall  have  a  new  birth  of 
freedom;  and  that  government  of  the  people,  by  the 
people,  for  the  people,  shall  not  perish  from  the  earth." 

Bronze  tablets  bearing  this  oration  for  their  in- 
scription have  been  put  on  the  walls  of  schoolhouses 
and  public  buildings  all  the  way  across  the  continent — 
plates  in  renewal  of  possession,  that  are  another  fruit- 
age of  the  valley  where  the  French  planted  their  plates 
of  possession  and  repossession  a  century  before. 

But  I  would  also  have  read — especially  in  France, 
where  letters  are  still  being  written  that  have  the 
quality  of  literature — a  letter  of  this  frontiersman.  The 
professor  of  history  in  the  College  of  the  City  of  New 
York,  showing  me  his  museum,  would  have  me  read 
again  this  letter  in  the  hand  of  Abraham  Lincoln;  and 
I  would  have  those  beyond  America,  as  well  as  in  that 
valley,  hear  what  a  man  of  the  western  waters  could 
write  before  the  coming  of  the  typewriter: 

"Dear  Madam:  I  have  been  shown  in  the  files  of 
the  War  Department  a  statement  of  the  Adjutant- 
General  of  Massachusetts  that  you  are  the  mother  of 
five  sons  who  have  died  gloriously  on  the  field  of 
battle.  I  feel  how  weak  and  fruitless  must  be  any 
words  of  mine  which  should  attempt  to  beguile  you 
from  the  grief  of  a  loss  so  overwhelming.  But  I  can- 
not refrain  from  tendering  to  you  the  consolation  that 


284    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

may  be  found  in  the  thanks  of  the  Republic  they  died 
to  save.  I  pray  that  our  heavenly  Father  may  assuage 
the  anguish  of  your  bereavement  and  leave  you  only 
the  cherished  memory  of  the  loved  and  lost  and  the 
solemn  pride  that  must  be  yours  to  have  laid  so  costly 
a  sacrifice  upon  the  altar  of  freedom. 
"Yours  very  sincerely  and  respectfully, 

"Abraham  Lincoln."  * 

These  two  examples  illustrate  not  only  the  form  of 
his  speech  and  writing,  but  the  sympathy  and  the 
temper  of  the  soul  of  the  man.  They  need  only  the 
supplement  of  a  comment  on  the  strength  of  his 
thought  in  expression.  It  is  said  of  his  Cooper  Union 
speech  (his  first  speech  before  a  large  eastern  urban  au- 
dience, I  think):  "From  the  first  line  to  the  last,  from 
his  premises  to  his  conclusion,  he  travels  with  a  swift, 
unerring  directness  which  no  logician  ever  excelled,  an 
argument  complete  and  full,  without  the  affectation 
of  learning.  ...  A  single,  easy,  simple  sentence  .  .  . 
contains  a  chapter  of  history  that,  in  some  instances, 
has  taken  days  of  labor  to  verify  and  which  must  have 
cost  the  author  months  of  investigation  to  acquire. 
.  .  .  Commencing  with  this  address  as  a  political 
pamphlet,  the  reader  will  leave  it  as  an  historical  work, 
brief,  complete,  profound,  truthful — which  will  survive 
the  time  and  occasion  that  called  it  forth  and  be  es- 
teemed hereafter,  no  less  for  its  intrinsic  worth  than 
its  unpretending  modesty."  2 

^'Lincoln,  Complete  Works"  (Nicolay  and  Hay  edition),  2  :  600.  To 
Mrs.  Bixby,  Boston,  Mass.,  November  1,  1864. 

2  Pamphlet  edition  with  notes  and  prefaces  by  C.  C.  Nott  and  Cephas 
Brainerd,  September,  i860.  Quoted  in  Nicolay  and  Hay,  "Abraham 
Lincoln,"  2  :  225. 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     285 

His  first  wide  fame  grew  from  a  speech  which  he 
delivered  on  October  16,  1854,  in  Peoria,  the  city  that 
had  grown  on  the  Illinois  River  by  the  side  of  La  Salle's 
Fort  Crevecceur.  "When  the  white  man  governs  him- 
self," he  said  there,  "that  is  self-government;  but  when 
the  white  man  governs  himself  and  also  governs  an- 
other man,  that  is  more  than  self-government — that  is 
despotism."1  Two  years  later  he  made  near  there  an 
address  so  irresistible  in  its  eloquence  that  the  reporters 
forgot  why  they  were  there  and  failed  to  take  notes. 
So  there  are  but  fragments  preserved  of  what  is  known 
as  "the  lost  speech." 

The  minor  anecdotes  of  his  life  that  are  treasured 
and  the  stories  which  he  is  said  to  have  told  would  fill 
a  volume — perhaps  volumes.  They  all  tell  of  a  genius 
who  through  adversity  became  resourceful,  who  through 
the  neighborly  exchanges  of  a  village  learned  a  sym- 
pathy as  wide  as  humanity,  and  who  with  an  infinite 
patience  and  kindliness  and  good  sense  dealt  with  a 
divided  people. 

The  world  outside  the  valley  at  first  thought  him  a 
buffoon  because  it  heard  only  the  echo  of  the  hoarse 
laughter  after  his  stories.  They  found  when  he  spoke 
in  Cooper  Union  that  he  had  a  mind  that  would  have 
sat  unembarrassed  and  luminous  in  the  company  of 
the  men  of  the  age  of  Pericles.  But  he  had  a  sense 
of  humor  that,  had  he  been  there,  would  have  saved 
Socrates  from  the  hyssop.  Mr.  Bryce  says,  that  all 
the  world  knows  the  Americans  to  be  a  humorous 
people.2  "They  are,"  he  has  said,  "as  conspicuously 
the  purveyors  of  humor  to  the  nineteenth  century  as 

1  "Lincoln,  Complete  Works,"  ed.  by  Nicolay  and  Hay,  2  :  227. 

2  Bryce,  "American  Commonwealth,"  2  :  286. 


286     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  French  were  the  purveyors  of  wit  to  the  eighteenth. 
.  .  .  [This  sense]  is  diffused  among  the  whole  people; 
it  colors  their  ordinary  life  and  gives  to  their  talk  that 
distinctively  new  flavor  which  a  European  palate  en- 
joys." And  he  adds:  "Much  of  President  Lincoln's 
popularity,  and  much  also  of  the  gift  he  showed  for 
restoring  confidence  to  the  North  at  the  darkest  mo- 
ments of  the  war,  was  due  to  the  humorous  way  he 
used  to  turn  things,  conveying  the  impression  of  not 
being  himself  uneasy,  even  when  he  was  most  so." 
Yet  it  was  no  mask,  it  was  instinctive. 

On  one  of  those  days  when  the  anxiety  was  keenest 
and  the  sky  darkest  a  delegation  of  prohibitionists 
came  to  him  and  insisted  that  the  reason  the  north 
did  not  win  was  because  the  soldiers  drank  so  much 
whiskey  and  thus  brought  the  curse  of  the  Lord  down 
upon  them.  There  was,  we  are  told,  a  mischievous 
twinkle  in  his  eye  when  he  replied  that  he  considered 
it  very  unfair  on  the  part  of  the  Lord,  because  the 
southerners  drank  a  good  deal  worse  whiskey  and  more 
of  it  than  the  soldiers  of  the  north. 

Most  of  these  stories  and  parables  had  a  flavor  of 
the  west  and  of  the  fields  where  they  were  collected  in 
the  days  when,  as  a  lawyer,  he  followed  the  court  from 
one  town  to  another,  and  spent  the  nights  in  talk  around 
the  tavern  stove. 

When  asked  one  day  how  he  disposed  of  a  caller 
who  had  come  to  him  in  a  towering  rage,  he  told  of  the 
farmer  in  Illinois  who  announced  one  Sunday  to  his 
neighbors  that  he  had  gotten  rid  of  a  great  log  in  the 
middle  of  his  field.  They  were  anxious  to  know  how, 
since  it  was  too  big  to  haul  out,  too  knotty  to  split, 
too  wet  and  soggy  to  burn.    And  the  farmer  announced : 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     287 

"I  ploughed  around  it."     "And  so,"  he  said,  "I  got 

rid  of  General .     I  ploughed  around  him,  but  it 

took  me  three  hours  to  do  it." 

This,  then,  was  the  lank  boatman  who  came  down 
the  river  (that  was  once  the  River  Colbert)  and  who, 
seeing  the  horrors  of  the  slave  markets  in  New  Orleans, 
went  back  to  the  Sangamon  with  a  memory  of  them 
that  was  a  "continual  torment,"  as  he  said,  and  with  a 
vow  to  hit  that  institution  hard  if  ever  he  had  a  chance. 
It  was  this  boatman  who  was  twenty  years  later  to 
have,  of  all  men,  the  chance. 

One  cannot  tell  here,  even  in  outline,  the  story  of 
that  irrepressible  conflict  in  which  this  western  plough- 
man and  lawyer  became  commander-in-chief  of  an 
army  of  a  million  men  and  carried  on  a  war  involving 
the  expenditure  of  three  billion  dollars.  One  need  not 
tell  it.  It  need  only  to  be  recalled  that  it  was  this 
man  of  the  western  waters  who  first  saw  clearly,  or 
first  made  it  clearly  seen,  that  the  nation  could  not 
endure  permanently  half  slave  and  half  free.  "I  do 
not  expect  the  Union  to  be  dissolved,"  he  said,  "but 
I  do  expect  it  will  cease  to  be  divided.  It  will  become 
all  one  thing  or  the  other."  And  it  was  he  who  more 
than  any  one  single  force  brought  the  fulfilment  of 
his  prophecy — of  a  nation  reunited  and  all  free. 

He  hated  slavery.  "If  slavery  is  not  wrong,"  he 
said,  "nothing  is  wrong."  But  he  wanted  to  get  rid 
of  it  without  injustice  to  those  to  whom  it  was  an  in- 
herited, if  cherished,  institution.  If  he  saw  a  venomous 
snake  in  the  road  he  would  take  the  nearest  stick  and 
kill  it,  but  if  he  found  it  in  bed  with  his  children,  "I 
might  hurt  the  children,"  he  said,  "more  than  the 
snake  and  it  might  bite  them."    He  was  as  tender  and 


288     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

considerate  of  the  south  as  ever  he  was  of  an  erring 
neighbor  in  Illinois,  where  it  is  remembered  that  he 
carried  home  with  his  giant  strength  one  whom  his 
comrades  would  have  left  to  freeze,  and  nursed  him 
through  the  night.  So  he  sat  almost  sleepless,  sad- 
hearted,  through  the  four  dark  years,  but  resolute, 
cheering  his  own  heart  and  those  about  him  with  a 
broad  humor  that  came  as  "iEsop's  Fables"  out  of  the 
fields  and  their  elemental  wisdoms. 

One  summer's  day,  when  ploughing  in  the  fields  of 
that  land  of  Lincoln,  I  heard  a  sound  of  buzzing  in 
the  air  and,  looking  up,  I  saw  a  faint  cloud  against  the 
clear  sky.  I  recognized  it  as  a  swarm  of  bees  making 
their  way  from  a  hive,  they  knew  not  where,  and  with 
an  instinct  born  of  the  plains  at  once  I  began  to  follow 
them  and  to  throw  up  clods  of  earth  to  stop  their  flight, 
bringing  them  down  finally  on  the  edge  of  the  field 
upon  a  branch  of  a  tree,  where  they  were  at  evening 
gathered  into  a  new  hive  and  persuaded  back  to  prof- 
itable industry  instead  of  wasting  their  substance  in 
the  forest.  So  this  great  ploughman  used  the  clods  of 
earth,  the  things  at  his  hand,  illustrations  from  the 
fields,  to  bring  the  thoughts  of  his  countrymen  down  to 
contentful  co-operation  again. 

"You  may,"  said  Alcibiades,  speaking  of  Socrates, 
"imagine  Brasidas  and  others  to  have  been  like 
Achilles,  or  you  may  imagine  Nestor  and  Antenor  to 
have  been  like  Pericles;  and  the  same  may  be  said  of 
other  famous  men.  But  of  this  strange  being  you  will 
never  be  able  to  find  any  likeness,  however  remote, 
either  among  men  that  now  are  or  who  ever  have  been 
— other  than  .  .  .  Silenus  and  the  Satyrs,  and  they 
represent  in  a  figure  not  only  himself  but  his  words. 


FROM  LA  SALLE  TO  LINCOLN     289 

For  his  words  are  like  the  images  of  Silenus  which  open. 
They  are  ridiculous  when  you  first  hear  them.  .  .  . 
His  talk  is  of  pack-beasts  and  smiths  and  cobblers  and 
curriers.  .  .  .  But  he  who  opens  the  bust  and  sees 
what  is  within  will  find  they  are  the  only  words  which 
have  a  meaning  in  them  and  also  the  most  divine, 
abounding  in  fair  images  of  virtue,  and  of  the  widest 
comprehension,  or  rather  extending  to  the  whole  duty 
of  a  good  and  honorable  man."1 

The  twenty-three  centuries  since  Socrates  do  not 
furnish  me  with  a  fitter  characterization  of  Lincoln. 
His  image  was  as  homely  as  that  of  Silenus  was  bestial. 
His  talk  was  of  ploughs  and  boats,  polecats  and 
whiskey.  But  those  who  opened  this  homely  image 
found  in  him  a  likeness  as  of  no  other  man,  and  in  his 
words  a  meaning  that  was  of  widest  and  most  ennobling 
comprehension.  And,  as  Crito  said  for  all  ages,  after 
the  sun  that  was  on  the  hilltops  when  Socrates  took  the 
poison  had  set  and  darkness  had  come:  "Of  all  the  men 
of  his  time,  he  was  the  wisest  and  justest  and  best." 
So  has  the  poet  of  that  western  democracy  given  to 
all  time  this  phrase,  sung  in  the  evening  of  the  day  of 
Lincoln's  martyrdom,  at  the  time  when  the  lilac  bloomed 
and  the  great  star  early  dropped  in  the  western  sky 
and  the  thrush  sang  solitary:  "The  sweetest,  wisest 
soul  of  all  my  days  and  lands."2 

We  ask  ourselves  if  he  was  the  gift  of  democracy. 
And  we  find  ourselves  answering:  his  peculiar  excel- 
lence could  have  come  of  no  other  order  of  society.  We 
ask  ourselves  anxiously  if  democracy  has  the  unerring 
instinct  to  find  such  men  to  embody  its  wishes,  or  did 

1  Plato,  "  Symposium,"  Jowett's  trans.,  I  :  592. 

2  Walt  Whitman,  "When  Lilacs  Last." 


290     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

it  take  him  only  for  a  talented  rail-splitter — an  aver- 
age man  ?  But  we  have  no  certain  answer  to  this 
anxious  questioning.  What  gives  most  hope  in  new 
confusions  and  problems,  unknown  to  his  day,  however, 
is  that  the  more  clearly  his  disinterestedness  and  for- 
bearance and  magnanimity  and  humility  are  revealed, 
the  wider  and  deeper  is  the  feeling  of  admiration  and 
love  for  his  character,  which  perhaps  assures  us,  after 
all,  better  than  anything  else,  of  the  soundness  and 
nobility  of  the  ideals  of  democracy. 

They  carried  this  man  at  death  over  into  the  valley 
of  his  birth,  into  the  land  of  the  men  of  the  western 
waters  that  was  Nouvelle  France,  and  there  buried 
him  among  his  neighbors,  of  whom  he  learned  his 
spirit  of  democracy,  in  the  midst  of  scenes  where  he 
had  mastered  its  language,  in  the  very  ground  that 
had  taught  him  his  parables,  by  the  side  of  the  stream 
that  gave  him  sight  of  his  supreme  mission.  It  is  the 
greatest  visible  monument  to  his  achievement  that  the 
"Father  of  Waters  .  .  .  goes  unvexed  to  the  sea"1 
through  one  country  instead  of  the  territory  of  two  or 
more  nations  and  that  the  slavery  he  witnessed  is  no 
more.  But  it  is  a  greater  monument  to  him,  as  it  is 
a  nobler  monument  to  those  who  have  erected  it  in 
their  own  hearts,  that  he  is  revered  the  length  of  the 
course  of  the  river  first  traced  by  La  Salle,  and  through 
all  the  reach  of  the  rivers  of  his  claim  from  its  source, 
even  as  far  as  its  mouth  at  the  limitless  sea. 

1  Letter  to  John  C.  Conkling,  August  25,  1863. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
THE  VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY 

FRANCE  evoked  from  the  unknown  the  valley 
that  may,  in  more  than  one  sense,  be  called  the 
heart  of  America.  Her  coureurs  de  bois  opened 
its  paths  made  by  the  buffalo  and  the  red  men  to  the 
shod  feet  of  Europe.  Her  explorers  planted  the  water- 
shed with  slender,  silent  portage  traces  that  have 
multiplied  into  thousands  of  noisy  streets  and  tied 
indissolubly  the  lakes  of  the  north  to  the  rivers  of 
the  south  from  which  they  were  long  ago  severed  by 
nature.  Her  one  white  sail  above  Niagara  marked  the 
way  of  a  mighty  commerce.  Her  soldiers  sowed  the 
molten  seeds  of  tumultuous  cities  on  the  sites  of  their 
forts,  and  her  priests  and  friars  consecrated  with  their 
faith  and  prayers  forest  trail,  portage* path,  ship's  sail, 
and  leaden  plate. 

But  that  is  not  all — a  valley  of  new  cities  like  the 
old,  of  new  paths  for  greater  commerce,  of  more 
altars  to  the  same  God !  The  chief  significance  and 
import  of  the  addition  of  this  valley  to  the  maps  of  the 
world,  all  indeed  that  makes  it  significant,  is  that  here 
was  given  (though  not  of  deliberate  intent)  a  rich,  wide, 
untouched  field,  distant,  accessible  only  to  the  hardiest, 
without  a  shadowing  tradition  or  a  restraining  fence, 
in  which  men  of  all  races  were  to  make  attempt  to  live 
together  under  rules  of  their  own  devising  and  enforc- 
ing.    And  as  here  the  government  of  the  people  by  the 

291 


292     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

people  was  to  have  even  more  literal  interpretation 
than  in  that  Atlantic  strip  which  had  traditions  of 
property  suffrage  and  church  privilege  and  class  dis- 
tinctions, I  have  called  it  the  "Valley  of  the  New 
Democracy." 

When  the  French  explorers  entered  it,  it  was  a 
valley  of  aboriginal,  anarchic  individualism,  with  little 
movable  spots  of  barbaric  communistic  timocracy,  as 
Plato  would  doubtless  have  classified  those  migratory, 
predatory  kingdoms  of  the  hundreds  of  red  kings,  con- 
temporary with  King  Donnacona,  whom  Cartier  found 
on  the  St.  Lawrence — communities  governed  by  the 
warlike,  restless  spirit. 

The  French  communities  that  grew  in  the  midst  of 
those  naked  timocrats,  whose  savagery  they  soothed 
by  beads  and  crucifixes  and  weapons,  were  the  plant- 
ings of  absolutism  paternalistic  to  the  last  degree. 
One  cannot  easily  imagine  a  socialism  that  would  go 
further  in  its  prescriptions  than  did  this  affectionate, 
capricious,  generous,  if  unwise,  as  it  now  seems,  govern- 
ment of  a  village  along  the  St.  Lawrence  or  the  Missis- 
sippi, from  a  palace  by  the  Seine  where  a  hard-working 
monarch  issued  edicts  "in  the  fulness  of  our  power 
and  of  our  certain  knowledge." 

The  ordinances  preserved  in  the  colonial  records 
furnish  abundant  proof  of  that  parental  concern  and 
restraint.  They  relate  to  the  regulation  of  inns  and 
markets,  poaching,  preservation  of  game,  sale  of 
brandy,  rent  of  pews,  stray  hogs,  mad  dogs,  matri- 
monial quarrels,  fast  driving,  wards  and  guardians, 
weights  and  measures,  nuisances,  observance  of  Sun- 
day, preservation  of  timber,  and  many  other  matters. 

Parkman  cites  these  interesting  ordinances,  which  il- 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      293 

lustrate  to  what  absurd  lengths  this  jealous,  paternal- 
istic care  extended: 

"Chimney-sweeping  having  been  neglected  at  Que- 
bec, the  intendant  commands  all  householders  promptly 
to  do  their  duty  in  this  respect,  and  at  the  same  time 
fixes  the  pay  of  the  sweep  at  six  sous  a  chimney.  An- 
other order  forbids  quarrelling  in  church.  Another 
assigns  pews  in  due  order  of  precedence."1 

One  intendant  issued  a  "mandate  to  the  effect  that, 
whereas  the  people  of  Montreal  raise  too  many  horses, 
which  prevents  them  from  raising  cattle  and  sheep, 
'being  therein  ignorant  of  their  true  interest,  .  .  .  now, 
therefore,  we  command  that  each  inhabitant  of  the 
cotes  of  this  government  shall  hereafter  own  no  more 
than  two  horses  or  mares  and  one  foal — the  same  to 
take  effect  after  the  sowing  season  of  the  ensuing  year 
(1710),  giving  them  time  to  rid  themselves  of  their 
horses  in  excess  of  said  number,  after  which  they  will 
be  required  to  kill  any  of  such  excess  that  may  remain 
in  their  possession."2 

And,  apropos  of  the  trend  toward  cities,  there  is  the 
ordinance  of  Bigot,  issued  with  a  view,  we  are  told,  of 
"promoting  agriculture  and  protecting  the  morals  of 
farmers"  by  saving  them  from  the  temptations  of  the 
cities:  "We  prohibit  and  forbid  you  to  remove  to  this 
town  (Quebec)  under  any  pretext  whatever,  without 
our  permission  in  writing,  on  pain  of  being  expelled 
and  sent  back  to  your  farms,  your  furniture  and  goods 
confiscated,  and  a  fine  of  fifty  livres  laid  on  you  for  the 
benefit  of  the  hospitals."3    There  is  even  a  royal  edict 

1  Parkman,  "Old  Regime  in  Canada,"  p.  341. 

2  Parkman,  "Old  Regime  in  Canada,"  p.  341. 

3  Parkman,  "Old  Regime  in  Canada,"  p.  342. 


294     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

designed  to  prevent  the  undue  subdivision  of  farms 
which  "forbade  the  country  people,  except  such  as 
were  authorized  to  live  in  villages,  to  build  a  house  or 
barn  on  any  piece  of  land  less  than  one  and  a  half 
arpents  wide  and  thirty  arpents  long."1 

And  this  word  should  be  added  in  intimation  of  the 
generosity  of  the  paternalism: 

"One  of  the  faults  of  his  [Louis  XIV's]  rule  is  the 
excess  of  his  benevolence,  for  not  only  did  he  give 
money  to  support  parish  priests,  build  churches,  and 
aid  the  seminary,  the  Ursulines,  the  missions,  and  the 
hospitals,  but  he  established  a  fund  destined,  among 
other  objects,  to  relieve  indigent  persons,  subsidized 
nearly  every  branch  of  trade  and  industry,  and  in  other 
instances  did  for  the  colonists  what  they  would  far 
better  have  learned  to  do  for  themselves."2 

Like  iEneas,  therefore,  these  filial  emigrants,  seek- 
ing new  homes,  not  only  carried  their  lares  et  penates 
in  their  arms  but  bore  upon  their  shoulders  their  father 
Anchises. 

Succeeding  savage  individualism,  this  benevolent 
despotism  gave  the  valley  into  the  keeping  of  an  in- 
dividualism even  purer  and  less  restrained  than  that 
which  it  succeeded,  for  the  sparse  pioneer  transmon- 
tane  settlements  were  practically  governed  at  first 
by  only  the  consciences  or  whims  of  the  inhabitants, 
instructed  of  parental  commandments  learned  the  other 
side  of  the  mountains,  and  by  their  love  of  forest  and 
of  their  prairie  neighbors. 

And  when  formal  government  came — a  pure  democ- 
racy,  social   and   political — it  came  of  individual  in- 

1  Parkman,  "Old  Regime  in  Canada,"  p.  342. 
2Parkman,  "Old  Regime  in  Canada,"  p.  347. 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      295 

terest  and  neighborly  love  and  of  no  abstract  philo- 
sophical theory  or  of  protest  against  oligarchy;  it  came 
from  the  application,  voluntary  for  the  most  part,  of 
"older  institutions  and  ideas  to  the  transforming  in- 
fluence of  land,"  free  land;  and  such  has  been  the 
result,  says  Professor  Turner,1  that  fundamentally 
"American  democracy  is  the  outcome  of  the  American 
people  in  dealing  with  the  West,"  that  is,  the  people 
of  this  valley  of  the  French  pioneers. 

The  democratical  man,  as  Socrates  is  made  to  define 
him  in  Plato's  "Republic,"  was  one  in  whom  the 
licentious  and  extravagant  desires  have  expelled  the 
moderate  appetites  and  love  of  decorum,  which  he 
inherited  from  his  oligarchical  father.  "Such  a  man," 
he  adds,  "lives  a  life  of  enjoyment  from  day  to  day, 
guided  by  no  regulating  principle,  but  turning  from 
one  pleasure  to  another,  just  as  fancy  takes  him.  All 
pleasures  are  in  his  eyes  equally  good  and  equally 
deserving  of  cultivation.  In  short,  his  motto  is  'Liberty 
and  Equality/" 

But  the  early  "democratical  man"  of  that  valley, 
even  if  he  came  remotely  from  such  oligarchical  sires 
as  Socrates  gives  immediately  to  all  democratical  men, 
reached  his  motto  of  "Liberty  and  Equality"  through 
no  such  sensual  definition  of  life. 

It  is  true  that  many  of  those  first  settlers  migrated 
from  places  where  the  opportunities  seemed  restricted 
or  conventions  irksome  or  privileges  unequal,  but  it 
was  no  "licentious  or  extravagant  desire"  or  flitting 
from  pleasure  to  pleasure  that  filled  that  valley  with 

1  See  his  "  Significance  of  the  Frontier  in  American  History,"  in  "  Fifth 
Yearbook  of  the  National  Herbart  Society,  1899,"  also  his  "Significance 
of  the  Mississippi  Valley  in  American  History,"  in  "Mississippi  Valley 
Historical  Association  Proceedings,  1909-10." 


296    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

sober,  pale-faced,  lean-featured  men  and  tired,  gentle 
women  who  enjoyed  the  "liberty"  not  of  a  choice  of 
pleasurable  indulgences  but  of  interminable  struggles, 
the  "equality"  of  being  each  on  the  same  social,  eco- 
nomic, and  political  footing  as  his  neighbor.  The 
sequent  democracy  was  derived  of  neighborliness  and 
good  fellowship,  the  "natural  issue  of  their  interests, 
their  occupations,  and  their  manner  of  life,"  and  was 
not  constructed  of  any  theory  of  an  ideal  state.  Nor 
were  they  frightened  by  the  arguments  of  Socrates, 
who  found  in  the  "extravagant  love  of  liberty"  the 
preface  to  tyranny.  And  they  would  not  have  been 
frightened  even  if  they  had  been  familiar  with  his 
doctrine  of  democracy.  They  little  dreamed  that  they 
were  exemplifying  the  doctrines  of  a  French  philoso- 
pher or  refuting  those  of  a  Greek  thinker. 

Those  primitive  democratic  and  individualistic  con- 
ditions had  not  yet  been  seriously  changed  when,  in 
that  bit  of  the  valley  which  lies  in  the  dim  background 
of  my  own  memory,  there  had  developed  a  form  of  gov- 
ernment more  stern  and  uncaressing.  But  there  was 
not  a  pauper  in  all  the  township  for  its  stigmatizing 
care.  There  was  not  an  orphan  who  did  not  have  a 
home;  there  was  not  a  person  in  prison;  there  was  only 
one  insane  person,  so  far  as  the  public  knew,  and  she 
was  cared  for  in  her  own  home.  The  National  Govern- 
ment was  represented  by  the  postmaster  miles  away; 
the  State  government  by  the  tax  assessor,  a  neighbor 
who  came  only  once  a  year,  if  he  came  at  all,  to  inquire 
about  one's  earthly  belongings,  which  could  not  then 
be  concealed  in  any  way;  and  the  local  government 
by  the  school-teacher,  who  was  usually  a  man  incapaci- 
tated for  able-bodied  labor  or  an  unmarried  woman. 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      297 

The  citizens  made  and  mended  the  public  roads,  looked 
after  the  sick  in  a  neighborly  way,  bought  their  chil- 
dren's schoolbooks,  and  buried  their  own  dead.  I  can 
remember  distinctly  wondering  what  a  "poor  officer" 
was,  for  there  were  no  poor  in  that  society  where 
none  was  rich. 

It  was  a  community  of  high  social  consistency,  pro- 
moted not  by  a  conscious,  disinterested  devotion  to 
the  common  welfare  but  by  the  common,  eagerly  in- 
terested pursuit  of  the  same  individual  welfares,  where 
there  was  room  enough  for  all. 

It  is  well  contended  in  a  recent  and  most  profound 
discussion  of  this  subject  by  Professor  Turner  (of  whom 
I  spoke  as  born  on  a  portage)  that  this  homogeneity 
of  feeling  was  the  most  promising  and  valuable  char- 
acteristic of  that  American  democracy.1 

And  it  was,  indeed,  prolific  of  mighty  consequences: 

First  of  all,  it  made  it  possible  for  the  United  States 
to  accept  Napoleon's  proffer  of  Louisiana. 

Second,  it  compelled  the  War  of  1812  and  so  con- 
firmed to  the  United  States  the  fruits  of  the  purchase, 
demonstrating  at  the  same  time  that  the  "abiding- 
place"  of  the  national  spirit  was  in  the  west. 

And,  third,  that  spirit  of  nationalism  took  into  its 
hands  the  reins  of  action  in  the  time  when  nationality 
was  in  peril.  Before  the  end  of  the  Civil  War  the 
west  was  represented  in  the  National  Government  by 
the  President,  the  Vice-President,  the  Chief  Justice, 
the  Speaker  of  the  House,  the  Secretary  of  the  Trea- 
sury, the  Postmaster-General,  the  Attorney-General, 
the  General  of  the  Army,  and  the  Admiral  of  the  Navy. 
And  it  furnished,  as  Turner  adds  in  summary,  the 

1  See  his  "Significance  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  in  American  History." 


298     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

"national  hero,  the  flower  of  frontier  training   and 
ideals." 

While  the  mere  fact  of  office-holding  does  not  in- 
dicate the  place  or  source  of  power,  it  is  noteworthy 
that  the  Presidents  since  the  war — to  the  election  of 
Wilson — Grant,  Hayes,  Garfield,  McKinley,  Harrison, 
and  Taft  all  came  from  this  valley.  Cleveland  went 
over  the  edge  of  it,  when  a  young  man,  to  Buffalo  and 
left  it  only  to  become  governor  and  President;  Arthur, 
who  succeeded  to  the  presidency  through  the  death  of 
President  Garfield,  and  President  Roosevelt,  who  also 
came  first  to  the  presidency  through  the  death  of  a 
President  and  was  afterward  elected,  were  both  residents 
of  New  York,  though  the  latter  had  a  ranch  in  the  far 
west  and  seems  rather  to  belong  to  that  region  than 
the  place  of  his  birth.  Thus  of  the  elected  Presidents 
there  was  not  one  who  had  not  a  middle-western 
origin,  experience,  or  association.  The  Chief  Justices 
since  the  war  have  been  without  exception  western 
men,  and  so  with  few  exceptions  have  been  the  Speakers 
of  the  House.  And  practically  all  these  Presidents, 
Chief  Justices,  Speakers,  were  pioneers  or  sons  of 
pioneers  in  that  "Valley  of  the  New  Democracy"  or,  at 
any  rate,  were  nurtured  of  its  natural  fellowships,  its 
one-man-as-good-as-another  institutions,  and  its  un- 
hampered ambitions. 

It  is  not  mere  geographical  and  numerical  majorities 
that  are  connoted.  It  is  the  dominancy  of  the  social, 
democratic,  national  spirit  of  the  valley — the  suprem- 
acy of  the  average,  the  useful  man,  his  power  and  self- 
sufficiency  when  standing  squarely,  firmly  upon  the 
earth.  It  was  the  secret  of  the  great  wrestler  Antaeus, 
the  son  of  Terra,  that  he  could  not  be  thrown  even  by 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      299 

Hercules  so  long  as  his  feet  touched  the  earth.  How 
intimately  filial  to  the  earth  and  neighborly  the  middle- 
west  pioneers  were  has  been  suggested.  And  it  was 
the  secret  of  their  success  that  they  stood,  every  man 
in  his  own  field,  on  his  own  feet,  and  wrestled  with  his 
own  arms  in  primitive  strength  and  virtue  and  self- 
reliant  ingenuity. 

Democracy  did  not  theorize  much,  and  when  it 
did  it  stumbled.  If  it  had  indulged  freely  in  the  ab- 
stractions of  its  practices,  it  would  doubtless  have 
suffered  the  fate  of  Antaeus,  who  was  finally  strangled 
in  mid-air  by  a  giant  who  came  over  the  mountains. 

As  it  was,  this  valley  civilization  apotheosized  the 
average  man.  Mr.  Herbert  Croly,  in  his  "Promise  of 
American  Life,"  makes  this  picture  of  him:  "In  that 
country  [the  very  valley  of  which  I  am  writing]  it  was 
sheer  waste  to  spend  much  energy  upon  tasks  which 
demanded  skill,  prolonged  experience,  high  technical 
standards,  or  exclusive  devotion.  The  cheaply  and 
easily  made  instrument  was  the  efficient  instrument, 
because  it  was  adapted  to  a  year  or  two  of  use,  and 
then  for  supersession  by  a  better  instrument;  and  for 
the  service  of  such  tools  one  man  was  as  likely  to  be 
good  as  another.  No  special  equipment  was  re- 
quired. The  farmer  was  required  to  be  all  kinds  of  a 
rough  mechanic.  The  business  man  was  merchant, 
manufacturer,  and  storekeeper.  Almost  everybody 
was  something  of  a  politician.  The  number  of  parts 
which  a  man  of  energy  played  in  his  time  was  aston- 
ishingly large.  Andrew  Jackson  was  successively  a 
lawyer,  judge,  planter,  merchant,  general,  politician, 
and  statesman;  and  he  played  most  of  these  parts  with 
conspicuous  success.     In  such  a  society  a  man  who  per- 


3oo    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

sisted  in  one  job  and  who  applied  the  most  rigorous 
and  exacting  standards  to  his  work  was  out  of  place 
and  was  really  inefficient.  His  finished  product  did 
not  serve  its  temporary  purpose  much  better  than  did 
the  current  careless  and  hasty  product,  and  his  higher 
standards  and  peculiar  ways  constituted  an  implied 
criticism  upon  the  easy  methods  of  his  neighbors. 
He  interfered  with  the  rough  good-fellowship  which 
naturally  arises  among  a  group  of  men  who  submit 
good-naturedly  and  uncritically  to  current  standards."1 

Is  this  what  democracy,  undefiled  of  aristocratic  con- 
ditions and  traditions,  has  produced  ?  it  will  be  asked. 
Has  pure  individualism  in  a  virgin  field  wrought  of  its 
opportunity  only  this  mediocre,  all-round,  good-natured, 
profane,  rough,  energetic,  ingenious  efficiency  ?  Is  this 
colorless,  insipid  "social  consistency"  the  best  wine 
that  the  valley  can  offer  of  its  early  vintages  ? 

I  know  those  frontier  Antaei,  who,  with  their  feet  on 
the  prairie  ground,  faced  every  emergency  with  a 
piece  of  fence  wire.  They  differed  from  their  European 
brothers  in  being  more  resourceful,  more  energetic,  and 
more  hopeful.  If  it  be  true  that  "out  of  a  million  well- 
established  Americans  taken  indiscriminately  from  all 
occupations  and  conditions,"  when  compared  to  a 
corresponding  assortment  of  Europeans,  "a  larger  pro- 
portion of  the  former  will  be  leading  alert,  active,  and 
useful  lives,"  though  they  may  not  be  wiser  or  better 
men;  that  there  will  be  a  "smaller  amount  of  social 
wreckage"  and  a  "larger  amount  of  wholesome  and 
profitable  achievement,"  it  may  be  safely  said  that,  if 
the  middle-west  frontier  Americans  had  been  under 
consideration,    the    proportion    of   alert    achievement 

'Herbert  Croly,  "Promise  of  American  Life,"  pp.  63,  64. 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      301 

would  have  been  higher  and  the  social  wreckage  smaller 
— partly  because  of  the  encouragement  of  the  economic 
opportunity,  and  partly  because  of  the  encouragement 
of  a  casteless  society. 

I  cannot  lead  away  from  those  familiar  days  without 
speaking  of  other  companionships  which  that  valley 
furnished  beyond  those  intimated — companionships 
which  did  not  interfere  with  the  rough  frontier  fellow- 
ships that  made  democracy  possible.  For  it  was  in 
these  same  fields  that  Horace  literally  sat  by  the 
plough  and  sang  of  farm  and  city.  It  was  there  that 
Livy  told  his  old-world  stories  by  lamplight  or  at  the 
noon-hour.  It  was  there  that  Pythagoras  explained 
his  ancient  theorem. 

I  cannot  insist  that  these  companionships  and  in- 
timacies were  typical,  but  they  were  sufficiently  numer- 
ous to  disturb  any  generalizations  as  to  the  sacrifices 
which  that  democracy  demanded  for  the  sake  of 
"social  conditions"  and  economic  regularity. 

The  advancing  frontier  soon  spent  itself  in  the  arid 
desert.  The  pioneer  came  to  ride  in  an  automobile. 
The  people  began  to  jostle  one  another  in  following 
their  common  aspirations,  where  once  there  was  free- 
dom for  the  energy,  even  the  unscrupulous  energy,  of 
all.  Time  accentuated  differences  till  those  who 
started  together  were  millions  of  dollars  apart.  Fail- 
ures had  no  kinder  fields  for  new  trials.  Democracy 
had  now  to  govern  not  a  puritanical,  industrious, 
sparsely  settled  Arcady  but  communities  of  conflict- 
ing dynamic  successes,  static  envies,  and  complaining 
despairs. 

It  met  the  new  emergencies  at  first,  one  by  one, 
with  no  other  programme  than  the  most  necessary  re- 


302     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

straints,  encouragement  of  tariffs  for  the  dynamic, 
improved  transportation  for  the  static,  and  charity  for 
the  despairful;  but  all  with  an  optimism  born  of  a 
belief  in  destined  success. 

To  this  has  succeeded  gradually  a  more  or  less 
clearly  defined  policy  of  constructive  individualism, 
under  an  increasingly  democratic  and  less  representa- 
tive control.  The  paternal  absolutism  of  Louis  XIV 
has  evolved  into  the  paternal  individualism  of  a  people 
who  are  constantly  struggling  in  imperfect  speech  to 
make  their  will  understood  and  by  imperfect  machinery 
to  get  it  done — and,  as  I  believe,  with  increasingly  dis- 
interested purpose.  It  is,  however,  I  emphasize,  the 
paternalism  of  a  highly  individualized  society. 

I  described  in  an  earlier  chapter  a  frontier  commu- 
nity in  that  valley.  See  what  has  come  in  its  stead, 
in  the  city  into  which  it  has  grown.  The  child  coming 
from  the  unknown,  trailing  clouds  of  glory,  creeps  into 
the  community  as  a  vital  statistic  and  becomes  of 
immediate  concern.  From  obliging  the  nurse  to  take 
certain  precautions  at  its  birth,  the  State  follows  the 
newcomer  through  life,  sees  that  he  is  vaccinated,  re- 
moves his  tonsils  and  adenoids,  furnishes  him  with 
glasses  if  he  has  bad  vision,  compels  him  to  school, 
prepares  him  not  only  for  citizenship  but  for  a  trade 
or  profession,  prevents  the  adulteration  of  his  food, 
inspects  his  milk,  filters  his  water,  stands  by  grocer 
and  butcher  and  weighs  his  bread  and  meat  for  him, 
cleans  the  street  for  him,  stations  a  policeman  at  his 
door,  transports  his  letters  of  business  or  affection, 
furnishes  him  with  seeds,  gives  augur  of  the  weather, 
wind,  and  temperature,  cares  for  him  if  he  is  helpless, 
feeds  him  if  he  is  starving,  shelters  him  if  he  is  homeless, 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      303 

nurses  him  in  sickness,  says  a  word  over  him  if  he  dies 
friendless,  buries  him  in  its  potter's  field,  and  closes  his 
account  as  a  vital  statistic  in  the  mortality  column. 

And  there  are  many  agencies  of  restraint  or  anxious 
care  that  stand  in  a  remoter  circle,  ready  to  come  in 
when  emergencies  require.  I  have  before  me  a  report 
of  legislation  in  the  States  alone  (that  is,  exclusive  of 
national  and  municipal  legislation)  for  two  years.  I 
note  here  a  few  characteristic  and  illustrative  measures 
out  of  the  thousands  that  have  been  adopted.  They 
relate  to  the  following  subjects: 

Health  of  women  and  children  at  work;  employer's 
liability;  care  of  epileptics,  idiots,  and  insane;  regula- 
tion of  dentistry  and  chiropody;  control  of  crickets, 
grasshoppers,  and  rodents;  exclusion  of  the  boll-weevil; 
the  introduction  of  parasites;  the  quenching  of  fires; 
the  burning  of  debris  in  gardens;  the  destruction  of 
predatory  fish;  the  prohibition  of  automatic  guns  for 
hunting  game;  against  hazing  in  schools;  instruction 
as  to  tuberculosis  and  its  prevention;  the  demonstra- 
tion of  the  best  methods  of  producing  plants,  cut 
flowers,  and  vegetables  under  glass;  the  establishment 
of  trade-schools;  the  practice  of  embalming. 

I  introduce  this  brief  but  suggestive  list  as  intimat- 
ing how  far  a  democratic  people  have  gone  in  doing  for 
themselves  what  Louis  XIV  at  Versailles  in  the  "ful- 
ness of  power"  and  out  of  "certain  knowledge"  did 
for  the  trustful  habitants  of  Montreal,  who  were 
"ignorant  of  their  true  interest." 

And,  of  course,  with  that  increased  paternalism  has 
come  of  necessity  an  army  of  public  servants — gov- 
ernors and  policemen,  street  cleaners  and  judges, 
teachers  and  factory  inspectors,  till,  as  I  have  esti- 


304    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

mated,  in  some  communities  one  adult  in  every  thirty 
is  a  paid  servant  of  the  public. 

Such  paternalism  is  not  peculiar  to  that  valley.  I 
remember,  years  ago,  when  I  was  following  the  legisla- 
tion of  an  eastern  State,  that  a  bill  was  introduced 
fixing  the  depth  of  a  strawberry  box,  and  another 
obliging  the  vender  of  huckleberries  to  put  on  the 
boxes  a  label  in  letters  of  certain  height  indicating 
that  they  were  picked  in  a  certain  way.  And  this 
paternalism  is  even  more  marked  in  the  old-age  pen- 
sion provision  in  England,  where  the  "mother  of 
parliaments,"  as  one  has  expressed  it,  has  been  put  on 
the  level  of  the  newest  western  State  in  its  parental 
solicitude. 

But  nowhere  else  than  in  this  valley,  doubtless,  is 
that  paternalism  so  thoroughly  informed  of  the  indi- 
vidualistic spirit.  Chesterton  said  of  democracy  that 
it  "is  not  founded  on  pity  for  the  common  man.  .  .  . 
It  does  not  champion  man  because  man  is  miserable, 
but  because  man  is  so  sublime."  It  "does  not  object 
so  much  to  the  ordinary  man  being  a  slave  as  to  his 
not  being  a  king."  Indeed,  democracy  is  ever  dream- 
ing of  "a  nation  of  kings."1  And  that  characteristic  is 
truer  of  the  democracy  that  came  stark  out  of  the  forests 
and  out  of  the  furrows  than  of  the  democracy  which 
sprang  from  protest  against  and  fear  of  single  kings. 

The  constitution  east  of  the  mountains  was  made 
in  fear  of  a  system  which  permitted  an  immediate  and 
complete  expression  of  the  will  of  the  people.  The 
movement  in  American  democracy  which  is  most 
conspicuous  is  the  effort  to  get  that  will  accurately 
and  immediately  expressed — that  is,  a  movement 
toward  what  might  be  called  more  democracy — toward 

XG.  K.  Chesterton,  "Heretics,"  p.  268. 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      305 

a  direct  control  of  "politics"  by  the  people — and  that 
movement  has  had  its  rise  and  strength  in  the  Missis- 
sippi Valley  and  beyond. 

But  who  are  the  people  who  are  to  control  ?  Only 
those  who  are  living  and  of  electoral  age  and  other 
qualification?  I  recall  again  Bismarck's  definition: 
"They  are  the  invisible  multitude  of  spirits — the  nation 
of  yesterday  and  to-morrow."  And  that  invisible  mul- 
titude of  yesterday  and  to-morrow,  whose  mouths  are 
stopped  with  dust  or  who  have  not  yet  found  human 
embodiment,  must  find  voice  in  the  multitude  of  to-day 
— the  multitude  that  inherits  the  yesterdays  and  has 
in  it  the  only  promise  of  to-morrow. 

There  may  be  some  question  there  as  to  its  being 
always  the  voice  of  God,  but  no  one  thinks  of  any  other 
(except  to  add  to  it  that  of  the  woman).  The  "certain 
knowledge"  and  the  "fulness  of  power"  of  Louis  XIV 
have  become  the  endowments  of  the  average  man — 
and  the  average  man  is  one-half  or  two-thirds  of  all  the 
voting  men  of  the  community  or  nation,  plus  one. 
But  that  average  man,  forgetful  of  the  multitude  of 
yesterday  and  ungrateful,  has  none  the  less  wrought 
into  his  very  fibre  and  spirit  the  uncompromising  in- 
dividualism, the  unconventional  neighborliness,  and 
the  frontier  fellowships  of  yesterday.  It  is  of  that 
that  he  is  consciously  or  unconsciously  instructed  at 
every  turn.  And  he  is  now  beginning  to  think  more 
and  more  of  the  invisible  multitude,  the  nation  of  to- 
morrow. 

It  is  deplored  that  the  so-called  individuality  de- 
veloped in  that  valley  is  "simply  an  unusual  amount  of 
individual  energy,  successfully  spent  in  popular  and 
remunerative   occupations,"   that   there   is   "not   the 


306    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

remotest  conception  of  the  individuality  which  may 
reside  in  the  gallant  and  exclusive  devotion  to  some 
disinterested  and  perhaps  unpopular  moral,  intellec- 
tual, or  technical  purpose,"  as  has  such  illustrious 
exhibition  in  France,  for  example.  This  is,  we  are  told, 
one  of  the  sacrifices  to  social  consistency  which  menaces 
the  fulness  and  intensity  of  American  national  life. 
And  the  most  serious  problem  is  to  make  a  nation  of 
independent  kings  who  shall  not  exercise  their  inde- 
pendencies "perversely  or  irresponsibly." 

Men  have  been  always  prone  to  make  vocational 
pursuits  the  basis  of  social  classification.  In  the  Scrip- 
ture record  of  man  he  had  not  been  seven  generations 
in  the  first  inhabited  valley  of  earth  before  his  descen- 
dants were  divided  into  cattlemen,  musicians,  and 
mechanics.  For  the  record  runs  that  Lamech  had 
three  sons,  Jabal,  Jubal,  and  Tubal — Jabal  who  became 
the  father  of  those  who  live  in  tents  and  have  cattle, 
Jubal  the  father  of  those  that  handle  the  harp  and  the 
organ,  and  Tubal  the  father  of  those  who  work  in 
brass  and  iron.  And  we  do  not  have  to  turn  many 
pages  to  discover  the  social  distinctions  that  grew  out 
of  the  vocational.  The  first  question  of  that  western 
valley  is,  "Who  is  he?"  and  the  answer  is  one  which 
will  tell  you  his  occupation.  No  one  who  has  not  an 
occupation  of  some  regularity  and  recognized  practical 
usefulness  is,  as  Mr.  Croly  intimates,  likely  to  have 
much  recognition. 

On  the  other  hand,  within  the  limits  of  approved 
occupations,  there  is,  except  in  great  centres,  no  marked 
social  stratification  based  on  vocation,  as  in  old-world 
life  and  that  of  the  new  world  more  intimately  touched 
by  the  old.     The  man  is  recognized  for  his  worth. 


VALLEY  OF  THE  NEW  DEMOCRACY      307 

In  the  midst  of  that  valley  is  a  college  town,1  planted 
by  a  company  of  migrants  from  an  older  State  sev- 
enty-five years  ago  who  bought  a  township  of  land, 
founded  a  college,2  and  built  their  homes  about  on 
the  wild  prairie.  It  has  now  twenty  thousand  in- 
habitants and  is  an  important  railroad  as  well  as  edu- 
cational centre.  It  was  nearly  fifty  years  old  when  I 
entered  it  as  a  student.  That  I  studied  Greek  did  not 
keep  me  from  knowing  well  a  carpenter;  that  in  spare 
hours  I  learned  a  manual  trade  and  put  into  type  my 
translation  of  "Prometheus  Bound"  did  not  bar  me 
from  the  homes  of  the  richest  or  the  most  cultured. 
Once,  when  a  student,  because  of  some  little  victory,  I 
was  received  by  the  mayor  and  a  committee  of  citizens, 
but  the  men  at  the  engines  in  the  shops  and  on  the 
engines  in  the  yards  blew  their  whistles.  When  I  went 
back  to  that  college  as  its  president  it  was  not  re- 
membered against  me  that  I  had  sawed  wood  or  driven 
a  plough.  I  knew  all  the  conductors  and  most  of  the 
engineers  on  the  railroads.  I  knew  every  merchant 
and  nearly  every  mechanic,  as  well  as  every  lawyer, 
judge,  and  doctor.  Men  had,  to  be  sure,  their  pref- 
erential associations,  but  these  were  personal  and 
not  determined  of  vocation  or  class.  A  recent  mayor 
of  this  city  of  two  colleges  was  a  cigar  maker  and,  I 
was  assured  by  a  professor  of  theology  in  a  local 
university,  the  best  mayor  it  has  had  in  years,  and 
he  died  driving  a  smallpox  patient  to  a  pest-house.  I 
received  when  in  Paris,  by  the  same  mail  as  I  recall, 
a  resolution  of  felicitation  from  a  Protestant  body  of 
which  I  was  a  member  in  that  town,  and  a  letter 
of  like  felicitation  from  the  Catholic  parish  priest  of 

1  Galesburg,  111.  *  Knox  College. 


308  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

that  same  city.  I  do  not  know  how  better  to  illustrate, 
to  those  who  are  working  at  the  problem  of  democracy 
in  other  valleys,  how  democracy  has  wrought  for  itself 
in  that  valley  of  neighborliness  and  resourcefulness  and 
plenty,  in  the  wake  of  the  monarchical,  paternalistic 
affection  of  France. 


CHAPTER  XV 

WASHINGTON:   THE   UNION   OF   THE    EASTERN 
AND  THE  WESTERN  WATERS 

WE  have  followed  the  French  explorers  and 
priests  as  pioneers  through  the  valleys  of  the 
St.  Lawrence,  the  Great  Lakes,  and  the  Mis- 
sissippi to  the  gulf  and  the  Rocky  Mountains.  But 
there  remains  one  further  conquest,  a  conquest  of 
their  adventurous  imaginations  only,  for  none  of  their 
adventurous  or  pious  feet  ever  travelled  over  the  val- 
ley lying  south  of  the  St.  Lawrence  watershed  and 
east  of  the  Alleghanies,  though  they  were  probably 
the  first  of  white  men  to  see  those  peaks  rising  in  the 
north  of  what  is  now  New  England,  known  as  the 
White  Mountains. 

Standing  on  the  summit  of  one  of  the  White  Moun- 
tains a  few  summers  ago,  I  was  shown  a  dim  little  in- 
dentation of  the  sky  at  the  northwest  which  I  was 
told  was  Mont  Real.  And  since  seeing  that  I  have 
imagined  Jacques  Cartier  in  1535  looking  off  to  the 
southeast,  when  his  disappointed  vision  of  the  west  had 
tired  his  eyes,  and  catching  first  sight  of  these  dim 
indentations  of  his  sky,  the  White  Mountains,  which 
the  colonists  from  England  did  not  see  until  a  century 
later  and  then  only  from  their  ocean  side. 

But  whether  the  master  pilot  from  the  white-bas- 
tioned  St.  Malo  saw  them  or  not,  we  have  record  that 

309 


310  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Champlain  in  his  exploration  of  the  Atlantic  coast  did 
discern  their  peaks  upon  his  horizon;  and  so  we  may 
think  of  the  French  as  the  discoverers  not  merely  of 
the  northern  and  western  valleys,  of  the  Adirondacks, 
in  whose  shadows  Champlain  and  Brule  and  Father 
Jogues  fought  with  the  Iroquois  and  suffered  torture, 
and  of  the  snow-capped  Rockies  at  whose  feet  Chevalier 
de  la  Verendrye  was  obliged  to  turn  back,  but  also 
of  the  tops  of  the  white  hills  near  the  Atlantic  coast, 
which  I  have  often  seen  lighted  at  sunrise  while  the 
lower  slopes  and  valleys  were  in  darkness  or  shadow — 
hills  touched  by  the  French,  as  by  that  rising  sun,  only 
at  their  tops  and  by  the  trails  of  their  eyes. 

For  the  moment  those  mountains  stand  upon  the 
horizon  as  the  symbol  of  the  only  part  of  North  Amer- 
ica east  of  the  Rockies  which  the  French  pioneers  did 
not  possess  before  others  by  the  trails  of  their  feet  or 
the  paths  of  their  boats.  Verrazano  of  Dieppe  had 
sailed  along  the  Atlantic  shore  front,  but  so,  perhaps, 
had  Cabot.  Ribaut  had  been  "put  to  the  knife"  in 
Florida,  but  it  was  the  knife  of  a  Spaniard  whose  com- 
patriots had  been  there  before  Ribaut.  Etienne  Brule 
had  wandered  all  the  way  from  Canada  into  Pennsyl- 
vania along  the  sources  and  upper  waters  of  the  Atlantic 
streams,  but  the  colonists  of  other  nations  were  sitting 
huddled  at  the  mouths  of  the  streams.  And  Father 
Jogues  had  endured  the  torturing  portage  from  the 
shores  of  Lake  George  to  the  Mohawk,  but  the  Dutch 
were  by  that  time  there  to  succor  him  from  the  Iro- 
quois. Only  with  their  eyes  had  the  French  beheld 
first  of  Europe  the  America  of  the  eastern  waters, 
whose  inhabitants,  when  they  came  to  put  on  uniform 
and    fight    for    its    independence,    called    themselves 


WASHINGTON  311 

"Continentals,"  as  if  their  little  hem  of  the  garment 
were  the  continent. 

One  wonders — if  to  little  purpose — what  would  have 
been  the  consequence  if  De  Monts,  whom  Champlain 
accompanied  to  America  in  1604,  had  planted  his  little 
colony  at  some  place  farther  south  in  his  continental 
grant  made  by  Henry  IV,  stretching,  as  it  did,  all  the 
way  from  what  is  now  Philadelphia  to  the  St.  Lawrence 
— if,  for  example,  he  had  anchored  off  the  Island  of 
Manhattan,  as  well  he  might  have  done,  five  years 
before  Hudson  came  up  the  harbor  in  the  Half  Moon, 
had  settled  there  instead  of  on  the  sterile  island  of  Ste. 
Croix  in  the  Bay  of  Fundy,  where,  amid  the  "sand, 
the  sedge,  and  the  matted  whortleberry  bushes,"  the 
commissioners  to  fix  the  boundaries  between  the  United 
States  and  Canada  discovered  in  1793 — nearly  two 
centuries  later — the  foundations  of  the  "Habitation  de 
l'isle  Ste.  Croix"  that  the  French  had  built  in  the 
gloom  of  the  cedars.  Or  if,  when  the  scurvy-stricken 
colony  left  that  barren  site,  they  had  followed  Cham- 
plain  to  the  mouth  of  the  Charles,  la  riviere  du  Guast 
— the  site  of  Cambridge  or  Boston — or  even  to  the 
Bay  St.  Louis — which  is  remembered  in  Champlain's 
journal  as  the  place  where  the  friendly  Indians  showed 
him  their  fish-hooks  made  of  barbed  bone  lashed  to 
wood,  but  which  has  become  better  known  as  Plym- 
outh Bay  where  the  Pilgrims  landed  fifteen  years 
later — there  instead  of  Port  Royal,  where  even  Les- 
carbot's  "Ordre  de  Bon-Temps"  could  not  overcome 
the  evil  reports  in  France  concerning  a  "churlish 
wilderness"!  Or  if  Champlain,  instead  of  seeking 
later  the  Rock  of  Quebec — whose  rugged  charms  he 
could  not  forget  even  in  the  presence  of  the  site  of 


312     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Boston  or  in  the  streets  of  Paris — had  laid  the  founda- 
tions of  his  faith  and  his  courage  on  the  Susquehanna, 
for  example  !  In  any  one  of  these  contingencies  there 
might  have  been  a  more  prosperous  Acadia.  New 
England  might  conceivably  have  become  Nouvelle 
France,  and  New  York  City  might  be  bearing  to-day 
the  name  of  a  seventeenth-century  French  prince. 

An  idle  conjecture,  but  it  does,  I  think,  help  us  to 
appreciate  the  happy  destiny  (or  by  whatever  name 
the  sequence  of  events  may  be  called)  not  that  kept 
France  out  of  that  narrow  Atlantic-coast  strip  but 
that  put  her  in  a  position  to  become  the  power  that 
should  in  a  very  true  sense  force  the  jealous,  many- 
minded  colonies  of  that  strip  into  a  union,  make  pos- 
sible the  erection  of  that  feeble  union  into  a  nascent 
nation,  give  it,  though  under  certain  compulsion,  ter- 
ritory to  become  a  world-power,  and  finally  furnish 
it,  if  grudgingly,  with  a  great  western,  overmountain 
domain  in  which  to  develop  a  democratic  and  a  nation- 
alistic spirit  strong  enough  to  hold  a  continent-wide 
people  in  one  republic.  These  services,  intended  and 
unintended,  negative  and  positive,  grudging  and  volun- 
tary, performed,  however,  all  in  unsurpassed  sacrifice 
and  valiance  not  only  of  the  explorers  and  priests 
but  of  the  exiled  soldiers,  intimate  how,  out  of  all  the 
misery  of  finding  the  northern  water  gate  and  keeping 
it  and  following  the  northern  waterway  and  fortifying 
it,  came  the  harvests — even  if  France  did  not  gather 
them  into  her  own  granaries — of  those  who  "sow  by  all 
waters." 

We  might  not  have  had  some  of  the  institutions  we 
do  have  if  Champlain  or  Poutrincourt  had  anticipated 
the  English  Pilgrims  at  Plymouth,  but  we  might  still 


WASHINGTON  313 

be  a  colony  or  a  cluster  of  republics,  even  with  all 
that  we  have  got  by  way  of  those  and  other  English 
migrants,  except  for  these  hardy  men  who  kept  battling 
with  the  ice  and  snow  and  water  and  famine  at  the 
north. 

But  what  I  wish  to  emphasize  here — and  I  am  much 
indebted  to  the  young  western  historian  Mr.  Hulbert, 
for  this  view — is  that  France,  struggling  to  keep  the 
empire  of  her  adventure  and  faith  in  the  northern  and 
western  valleys  of  America,  gave  to  the  world  George 
Washington.  She  made  him,  all  unconsciously  to  be 
sure,  first  in  war.  She  saved  him,  consciously,  from 
the  fate  of  an  unsuccessful  rebel.  And  she  made  it 
possible  for  him  to  be  first  in  peace.  These  are  all  de- 
fensible theses,  however  much  or  little  credit  France 
may  deserve  in  her  purposes  toward  him. 

Up  in  those  same  White  Mountains  there  rises  one 
that  bears  his  name,  taller  than  the  rest.  It  stands  in 
a  presidential  range  that  has  no  rivalling  peak.  A 
singular  felicity  in  the  naming  of  the  neighboring 
mountains  has  given  the  name  Lafayette  to  the  most 
picturesque  of  all.  There  are  well-known  and  much- 
travelled  trails  to  the  austere  peak  of  Mount  Washing- 
ton. There  is  even  a  railroad  now.  Doubtless  no 
mountain  in  America  is  known  in  its  contour  to  more 
people,  though  there  are  many  of  loftier  height  and  of 
more  inviting  slopes. 

So  the  outlines  of  the  life  of  Washington  are  known 
more  widely  than  those  of  any  other  American.  The 
trails  to  the  height  of  his  achievement  and  genius  have 
doubtless  been  learned  in  the  histories  of  France.  And 
asking  my  readers  to  travel  over  one  of  those  well-worn 
trails  again,  I  can  offer  no  better  reason  than  that  I 


314    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

may  on  the  way  call  attention  to  objects  and  outlooks 
that  should  be  of  special  interest  to  the  eyes  of  a  com- 
pany of  men  and  women  whose  geographical  or  racial 
ancestors  gave  us  him  in  giving  us  the  west. 

Washington  was  born  a  British  colonist.  His  great- 
grandfather settled  in  Virginia  at  about  the  time  that 
La  Salle  was  making  his  way  up  the  St.  Lawrence  to 
the  seigniory  of  St.  Sulpice  above  the  Lachine  Rapids. 
His  father,  grandfather,  and  great-grandfather  were 
frontiersmen,  farmers,  or  planters.  He  had  himself  the 
discipline  of  the  plantation,  but  he  learned  surveying 
and  had  also  the  sterner  experiences  of  its  frontier  prac- 
tice. Then  came  his  appointment  at  nineteen  as  an 
adjutant-general  of  colonial  militia  in  Virginia  and 
with  that  office  the  still  sterner  disciplines  beyond 
the  frontier,  where  France  was  tutor,  without  which 
tuition  he  would  doubtless  have  become  and  remained 
a  successful  colonial  Virginia  planter  and  general  of 
militia. 

I  have  estimated  that  all  the  young  men  in  America 
of  approximately  Washington's  age  at  that  time  could 
probably  have  been  gathered  into  the  Roman  Colos- 
seum back  of  the  Pantheon;  at  any  rate,  into  an 
American  university  stadium.  They  could  have  been 
reached  by  the  voice  of  one  man.  (Which  will  inti- 
mate how  small  America  was — one-fourth  the  size  of 
Paris  when  he  was  born,  one-half  the  size  of  Paris 
when  he  became  a  major  of  militia.) 

They  were  practically  all  country-born.  There  were, 
indeed,  no  great  cities  in  which  to  be  born.  New  York 
was  little  more  than  a  town  with  only  eight  or  nine 
thousand  inhabitants;  and  Boston,  the  largest  city  at 
that  time,  had  but  thirteen  thousand  in  the  year  1732. 


WASHINGTON  315 

They  were  men,  as  Kipling  says  of  the  colonials  in 
the  Boer  War,  who  could  "shoot  and  ride."  And 
Washington  was  a  strong  athletic  youth  of  fiery  pas- 
sions, which,  given  free  rein,  would  have  made  him  a 
successful  Indian  chief.  (Indeed,  the  Indians  admired 
him  and  called  him  Ha-no-da-ga-ne-ars — "the  destroyer 
of  cities" — and  at  last  admitted  him,  as  a  supreme 
tribute,  to  their  Indian  paradise,  the  only  white  man 
found  worthy  of  such  canonization.)  But,  rugged, 
country-born  men  though  they  were,  it  was  in  no  such 
neighborly  democracy  as  Lincoln  knew  that  they  were 
bred.  Washington  had  his  slaves,  his  coat  of  arms, 
and  the  occupations  and  leisures  and  pleasures,  so  far 
as  the  frontier  would  permit,  of  an  English  gentleman. 
And  it  is  no  such  slouchy,  shabbily  dressed  figure  as 
Lincoln's  that  Washington  presents.  I  saw  a  few 
years  ago  a  letter  in  Washington's  own  hand,  in  which 
he  gave  directions  to  the  tailor  as  to  the  number  of 
buttons  that  his  coat  should  have,  the  shape  of  its  lapel, 
and  the  fit  of  its  collar.  He  was  most  insistent  upon 
the  conventions,  though  if  such  an  assembly  had  been 
held,  as  I  have  suggested,  of  the  young  men  from  the 
eastern  waters,  there  would  have  been  no  such  uni- 
formity of  costume  as  now  makes  an  audience  of  men 
in  America,  or  in  Europe,  so  monotonously  black  and 
white. 

These  young  men  did  not  dress  alike;  they  did  not 
spell  alike.  Washington's  letters  show  that  he  did  not 
even  spell  consistently  with  himself.  And  that  first 
man  of  the  eastern  waters  to  follow  the  French  in 
establishing  a  settlement  on  the  western  waters, 
Daniel  Boone,  left  this  memorial  of  his  orthography  on 
a  tree  in  Kentucky:  "C-I-L-L-E-D    A    B-A-R." 


316    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

They  did  not  dress  alike,  they  did  not  spell  alike, 
they  did  not  think  alike.  It  was  a  great,  and  it  must 
have  seemed  a  hopeless,  motley  of  men  who  were  all 
unconsciously  to  lay  the  foundations  of  a  new  national 
structure. 

They  were  all  of  immigrant  ancestors,  and  most  of 
them  of  most  recent  immigrant  ancestry,  or  of  foreign 
birth.  Though  much  more  homogeneous  in  their  lineage 
than  the  present  immigration,  they  had  not  the  unify- 
ing agencies  that  now  keep  Maine  and  Florida  within  a 
few  minutes  of  each  other  by  telephone  or  a  few  hours 
by  rail. 

But  there  were  in  all,  immigrants  and  sons  of  immi- 
grants, hardly  more  in  number  than  now  enter  that 
same  land  as  aliens  in  one  or  two  years.  I  spoke  a  few 
years  ago  at  a  dinner  of  the  descendants  of  the  May- 
flower and  was  told  that  they  numbered  in  all  the 
country,  as  I  recall,  about  three  thousand — three  thou- 
sand descendants  in  three  hundred  years  of  a  hundred 
colonists,  half  of  whom  perished  in  the  first  winter; 
which  leads  one  to  wonder  what  the  land  of  the  May- 
flower and  the  nation  of  George  Washington  will  be  in 
three  hundred  years,  when  the  descendants  of  each 
shipload  of  immigrants  of  to-day  will  have  increased 
in  like  ratio.  From  a  single  steerage  passenger  cargo, 
of  the  Lusitania  or  Mauretania,  let  us  say,  we  shall 
have  twenty,  thirty,  or  forty  thousand  Lusitanians  or 
Mauretanians  as  descendants;  and  from  a  single  year's 
immigration  thirty  millions.  The  descendants  of  the 
colonial  ships  will  be  lost  in  this  mighty  new  progeny 
of  the  ships  of  Europe  and  will  numerically  be  as  negli- 
gible as  the  North  American  Indian  is  in  our  census  to- 
day. 


WASHINGTON  317 

But  to  come  back  to  Washington:  the  appointment 
of  the  stripling  as  adjutant-general  with  rank  of  major 
was  two  years  after  the  humpbacked  Governor  Ga- 
lissonniere  had  sent  Celoron  down  the  Ohio  on  that 
historic  voyage  of  plate-planting,  the  news  of  which 
had  finally  reached  the  ears  of  the  governor  of  Vir- 
ginia, who  with  many  planters  of  Virginia  (Washing- 
ton's family  included)  had  a  prospective  interest  in 
lands  along  that  same  river.  Then  came  the  word 
through  Indian  and  trader  (the  only  long-distance 
telephones  of  that  time)  that  forts  were  beginning  to 
grow  where  the  plates  had  been  planted. 

It  was  then  that  the  young  farmer,  surveyor,  soldier, 
just  come  of  age,  was  chosen  to  carry  a  message  to 
the  commander  of  the  nearest  French  fort  in  the 
valley — Fort  Le  Boeuf,  which  I  have  already  described 
— about  fifteen  miles  from  Lake  Erie  on  the  slight  ele- 
vation from  which  the  waters  begin  to  flow  toward  the 
Mississippi.  The  commander  was  Legardeur  de  St. 
Pierre,  a  one-eyed  veteran  of  wars,  but  recently  come 
from  an  expedition  out  across  the  valley  toward  the 
Rockies. 

Parkman  has  made  this  picture  of  the  momentous 
meeting  of  France  and  America  in  the  western  wilder- 
ness, which  in  its  peopling  has  kept  only  a  single  tree 
of  those  forests,  a  tree  pointed  out  to  me  as  the  Wash- 
ington tree,  though  it,  too,  may  have  come  with  the 
migrants: 

"The  surrounding  forests  had  dropped  their  leaves, 
and  in  gray  and  patient  desolation  bided  the  coming 
winter.  Chill  rains  drizzled  over  the  gloomy  'clearing,' 
and  drenched  the  palisades  and  log-built  barracks,  raw 
from  the  axe.     Buried  in  the  wilderness,  the  military 


318     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

exiles  [Legardeur  and  his  garrison]  resigned  themselves 
as  they  might  to  months  of  monotonous  solitude; 
when,  just  after  sunset  on  the  eleventh  of  December,  a 
tall  youth  [and  he  was  only  an  inch  shorter  than  Lin- 
coln, six  feet  three  inches]  came  out  of  the  forest  on 
horseback,  attended  by  a  companion  much  older  and 
rougher  than  himself,  and  followed  by  several  Indians 
and  four  or  five  white  men  with  packhorses.  Officers 
from  the  fort  went  out  to  meet  the  strangers;  and, 
wading  through  mud  and  sodden  snow,  they  entered 
at  the  gate.  On  the  next  day  the  young  leader  of  the 
party,  with  the  help  of  an  interpreter,  for  he  spoke 
no  French  [a  deficiency  which  he  laments  with  great- 
est regret  later  in  life],  had  an  interview  with  the 
commandant  and  gave  him  a  letter  from  Governor 
Dinwiddie.  St.  Pierre  and  the  officer  next  in  rank, 
who  knew  a  little  English,  took  it  to  another  room 
to  study  it  at  their  ease;  and  in  it,  all  unconsciously, 
they  read  a  name  destined  to  stand  one  of  the  noblest 
in  the  annals  of  mankind,  for  it  introduced  Major 
George  Washington,  Adjutant-General  of  the  Virginia 
Militia."1 

At  the  end  of  three  days  the  young  British  colonial 
officer  of  militia  started  on  his  perilous  journey  home- 
ward, having  been  most  hospitably  entertained  by  the 
one-eyed  veteran,  bearing  on  his  person  a  letter  which 
St.  Pierre  and  his  officer  had  been  the  three  days  in 
preparing.  The  brave,  courteous,  soldierly  lines  of  the 
frontier  deserve  to  be  heard  to-day  both  in  France  and 
America: 

"I  am  here  by  Virtue  of  the  Orders  of  my  General; 
and  I  entreat  you,  Sir,  not  to  doubt,  one  Moment,  but 

'Parkman,  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe,"  i  :  136-7. 


WASHINGTON  319 

that  I  am  determined  to  conform  myself  to  them  with 
all  the  Exactness  and  Resolution  which  can  be  expected 
from  the  best  Officer.  ...  I  don't  know  that  in  the 
Progress  of  this  Campaign  [of  repossession]  anything 
passed  which  can  be  reputed  an  Act  of  Hostility  or  is 
contrary  to  the  Treaties  which  subsist  between  the 
two  Crowns.  .  .  .  Had  you  been  pleased,  Sir,  to  have 
descended  to  particularize  the  Facts  which  occasioned 
your  Complaints  I  should  have  had  the  Honor  of 
answering  you  in  the  fullest,  and,  I  am  persuaded,  most 
satisfactory  Manner." 

In  the  spring  the  two  hundred  canoes  which  Wash- 
ington saw  moored  by  the  Riviere  aux  Boeufs  carried 
the  builders  of  Fort  Duquesne  and  a  garrison  for  it 
down  La  Belle  Riviere,  and  a  little  later  is  heard  the 
volley  of  the  Virginia  backwoodsmen  up  on  the  Laurel 
ridges  a  little  way  back  from  Duquesne,  the  volley 
which  began  the  strife  that  armed  the  civilized  world 
— the  backwoodsmen  commanded  by  the  Virginia 
youth,  George  Washington. 

It  is  in  that  lonely  ravine  up  among  the  ridges 
which  I  have  described  in  an  earlier  chapter  that  the 
union  of  the  eastern  and  western  waters  began.  And 
there  should  be  a  monument  beside  Jumonville's  to 
keep  succeeding  generations  mindful  of  the  mighty 
consequence  of  what  happened  then. 

This  fray  of  the  mountains  was  one  of  the  most 
portentous  of  events  in  American  history.  It  was  not 
only  the  grappling  of  two  European  peoples  and  two 
systems  of  government  out  upon  the  edges  of  the 
civilized  world — the  stone-age  men  assisting  on  both 
sides — a  fray  in  which  Legardeur  de  St.  Pierre, 
Coulon  de  Jumonville,  and  de  Villiers,  his  avenging 


320    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

brother,  were  France,  and  Washington  was  England. 
It  was  the  beginning  of  the  making  of  a  new  nation, 
of  which  that  tall  youth,  who  found  the  whizzing  of 
bullets  a  "charming  sound,"  was  to  be  the  very  corner- 
stone. 

He  was  here  having  his  first  tuition  of  war.  De 
Villiers  let  him  march  back  from  Fort  Necessity  un- 
harmed, when  he  might,  perhaps,  have  ended  the 
career  of  this  young  major  in  the  great  meadows  where 
they  fought  "through  the  gray  veil  of  mists  and  rain." 
Washington  was  taught  by  France,  in  these  years  of 
border  warfare — for  he  went  four  times  over  the  moun- 
tains— he  was  spared  by  France  in  the  end  to  help 
take  from  France  the  title  of  the  west,  or  so  it  seemed 
when,  in  1763,  the  war  which  his  command  had  begun 
was  ended  in  the  surrender  of  that  vast  domain  to 
England.  But  we  know  now  that  the  struggle  had 
other  issue. 

The  steep  path  of  the  years  when  the  colonies  were 
taught  their  first  lessons  of  federation  by  their  common 
fear  of  the  French  and  their  allies,  led  by  the  tall  young 
man  who  emerged  from  the  woods  back  of  Fort  Le 
Boeuf  and  later  assisted  by  the  moral  and  pecuniary 
sympathy  of  France,  by  the  presence  of  her  ships  along 
their  menaced  coasts,  by  the  counsels  of  her  admirals 
and  generals,  and  by  the  marching  and  fighting  of  her 
soldiers  side  by  side  with  theirs,  you  know.  It  is  a 
path  so  marked  by  memorials  as  to  need  no  spoken 
word.  Only  one  vista  in  this  trail  of  gloom  with  over- 
hanging clouded  sky  need  detain  us  a  moment.  It 
lets  us  see  Benjamin  Franklin  rejoicing  in  Paris 
after  the  news  of  the  surrender  of  Burgoyne  at  Sara- 
toga  in    1777.     We  see  Beaumarchais  rushing  away 


WASHINGTON  321 

from  Franklin's  lodgings  in  Passy  to  spread  the  good 
news,  and  in  such  mad  haste  that  he  upset  his  carriage 
and  dislocated  his  arm.  And  when  we  next  look  out 
from  the  path  we  see  the  British  soldiers  passing  in 
surrender  between  two  lines  drawn  up  at  Yorktown, 
the  American  soldiers  on  one  side  with  Washington  at 
their  head,  and  on  the  other  the  French  soldiers  under 
Count  Rochambeau. 

Washington  and  Legardeur  de  St.  Pierre  at  Fort  Le 
Boeuf,  Washington  and  Rochambeau  at  Yorktown ! 
You  have  been  told  again  and  again  that  except  for 
the  France  of  Rochambeau  the  War  of  Independence 
would  probably  have  failed  and  that  the  colonies 
would  have  remained  English  colonies.  But  let  us 
remember  that  except  for  the  France  of  Legardeur  de 
St.  Pierre  there  would  probably  not  have  been,  as 
Parkman  says,  a  "revolution";  and  by  the  France  of 
Legardeur  I  mean  the  spirit  of  France  that  had  illus- 
tration in  his  lonely,  exiled  watching  of  the  regions  won 
by  her  pioneers. 

The  French  man-of-war  Triumph  brought  to  Phila- 
delphia in  May  of  1783  the  treaty  of  Paris.  In  the 
December  following  General  Washington  said  farewell 
to  his  officers  and  returned  to  Mount  Vernon,  his 
estate  on  the  Potomac.  There  he  was  busied  through 
the  next  few  months  in  putting  his  private  affairs  in 
order,  in  superintending  the  reparation  of  his  planta- 
tion, and  in  receiving  those  who  came  to  him  for 
counsel  or  to  express  their  gratitude.  It  was  as  a  level 
bit  of  the  mountain  trail  from  which  the  traveller 
catches  glimpses  of  a  peaceful  valley.  And  that  is  all 
that  the  traveller  usually  sees. 

But  there  is  a  farther  view.     From  that  level  path 


322     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

one  can  see  over  the  Alleghanies  the  great  valley  so 
familiar  to  our  eyes  from  other  points  of  view,  stretch- 
ing toward  the  Mississippi. 

In  the  autumn  of  1784  (eight  months  after  his  fare- 
well to  the  army)  Washington  leaves  his  home,  as  it 
appears,  to  visit  some  lands  which  he  had  acquired 
as  one  result  of  his  earlier  and  martial  trips  out  beyond 
the  Laurel  Hills.  He  had  title  to  forty  thousand  acres 
beyond  the  mountains.  He  had  even  purchased  the 
site  of  this  first  battle  in  the  meadows,  where  he  had 
built  Fort  Necessity  and  where  he  was  himself  cap- 
tured by  the  French,  but  from  which  he  was  permitted 
to  go  back  over  the  mountains  with  his  flags  flying  and 
his  drums  beating.  A  "charming  field  of  encounter" 
he  called  the  place  in  his  youthful  exuberance  before  the 
battle  in  1753.  "Much  Hay  may  be  cut  here  When 
the  ground  is  laid  down  in  Grass;  and  the  upland,  East 
of  the  Meadow  is  good  for  grain,"  he  wrote  in  his  un- 
sentimental diary,  September  12,  1784.  For  over  the 
mountains  he  went  again  on  what  was  thought  but  a 
trip  of  personal  business.  But  on  the  third  day  of  the 
journey,  September  3d,  he  writes,  incidentally,  as  ex- 
plaining his  desire  to  talk  with  certain  men:  "one  ob- 
ject of  my  journey  being  to  obtain  information  of  the 
nearest  and  best  communication  between  the  Eastern 
and  Western  Waters."  And  as  he  advances  this  be- 
comes the  possessing  object. 

Here  are  a  few  extracts  from  that  diary  still  pre- 
served in  his  own  hand  which  give  the  intimation  of  a 
prescience  that  should  in  itself  hold  for  him  a  grateful 
place  in  the  memory  of  the  west  and  of  a  concern 
about  little  things  that  should  bring  him  a  bit  nearer 
to  our  human  selves: 


WASHINGTON  323 

September  6.  "Remained  at  Bath  all  day  and  was 
showed  the  Model  of  a  Boat  constructed  by  the  in- 
genious Mr.  (James)  Rumsey  for  ascending  rapid  cur- 
rents by  mechanism.  .  .  .  Having  hired  three  Pack 
horses  to  give  my  own  greater  relief.  .  .  ." 

September  II,  "This  is  a  pretty  considerable  water 
and,  as  it  is  said  to  have  no  fall  in  it,  may,  I  conceive, 
be  improved  into  a  valuable  navigation.   .   .   ." 

September  12.  "Crossing  the  Mountains,  I  found 
tedious  and  fatieguing  [sic].  ...  In  passing  over 
the  Mountains  I  met  numbers  of  Persons  and  Pack 
horses  .  .  .  from  most  of  whom  I  made  enquiries  of 
the  nature  of  the  Country.   .   .   ." 

September  13.  "I  visited  my  Mill"  [a  mill  which 
he  had  had  built  before  the  Revolution].   .  .  . 

September  15.  "This  being  the  day  appointed  for 
the  Sale  of  my  moiety  of  the  Co-partnership  Stock 
many  People  were  gathered  (more  out  of  curiosity  I 
believe  than  from  other  motives).  My  Mill  I  could  ob- 
tain no  bid  for.  .  .  ." 

September  19.  "Being  Sunday,  and  the  People  liv- 
ing on  my  Land,  apparently  very  religious"  [these  were 
Scotch-Irish  who  had  squatted  on  a  rich  piece  of  land 
patented  by  Washington],  "it  was  thought  best  to 
postpone  going  among  them  till  to-morrow.   .   .  ." 

September  20.  "I  told  them  I  had  no  inclination 
to  sell;  however,  after  hearing  a  good  deal  of  their 
hardships,  their  Religious  principles  (which  had  brought 
them  together  as  a  society  of  Ceceders  [sic])  and  un- 
willingness to  seperate  [sic]  or  remove;  I  told  them  I 
would  make  them  a  last  offer.  .  .  ." 

September  22.  "Note — In  my  equipage  Trunk  and 
the  Canteens — were  Madeira  and  Port  Wine — Cherry 


324     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

bounce — Oyl,  Mustard — Vinegar — and  Spices  of  all 
sorts — Tea,  and  Sugar  in  the  Camp  Kettles  (a  whole 
loaf  of  white  sugar  broke  up  about  7  lbs.  weight).  .  .  . 
My  fishing  lines  are  in  the  Canteens.  .  .  ." 

September  23.  "An  Apology  made  to  me  from  the 
Court  of  Fayette  (thro'  Mr.  Smith)  for  not  addressing 
me." 

The  Cheat  at  the  Mouth  is  about  125  yds  wide — the 
Monongahela  near  dble  that — the  colour  of  the  two 
Waters  is  very  differ1,  that  of  Cheat  is  dark  (occasioned 
as  is  conjectured  by  the  Laurel,  among  which  it  rises, 
and  through  which  it  runs)  the  other  is  clear,  &  there 
appears  a  repugnancy  in  both  to  mix,  as  there  is  a 
plain  line  of  division  betw11  the  two  for  some  distance 
below  the  fork;  which  holds,  I  am  told  near  a  Mile. — 
the  Cheat  keeps  to  the  right  shore  as  it  descends,  & 
the  other  the  left. 

September  25.  "At  the  crossing  of  this  Creek  McCul- 
loch's  path,  which  owes  its  origen  [sic]  to  Buffaloes.  .  .  . 
At  the  entrance  of  the  above  glades  I  lodged  this 
night,  with  no  other  shelter  or  cover  than  my  cloak  & 
was  unlucky  enough  to  have  a  heavy  shower  of  Rain." 

September  26.  "We  had  an  uncomfortable  travel  to 
one  Charles  Friends,  about  10  miles;  where  we  could 
get  nothing  for  our  horses,  and  only  boiled  Corn  for 
ourselves." 

October  1.  "I  had  a  good  deal  of  conversation  with 
this  Gentleman  on  the  Waters,  and  trade  of  the  Western 
Country." 

October  4.  "I  breakfasted  by  Candlelight,  and 
Mounted  my  horse  soon  after  daybreak.  I  arrived  at 
Colchester,  30  Miles,  to  Dinner;  and  reached  home  be- 
fore Sun  down."1 

1A.  B.  Hulbert,  "Washington  and  the  West,"  pp.  32-85. 


WASHINGTON  325 

In  this  revelation  of  Washington  out  of  the  laconic 
misspelled  entries  of  his  diary  we  have  not  only  a 
most  human  portrait  but  an  intimation  of  his  prac- 
tical far-seeing  statesmanship.  He  looms  even  a  larger 
figure  as  he  rides  through  the  fog  of  the  Youghiogheny, 
for  there  he  appears  as  the  prophet  of  the  eastern  and 
western  waters.  In  his  vision  the  New  France  and  the 
New  England  are  to  be  indissolubly  bound  into  a  New 
America.  He  had  written  Chevalier  de  Chastellux 
from  Princeton,  October  12,  1783,  after  a  return  from 
the  Mohawk  Valley,  that  he  could  not  but  be  struck 
by  the  immense  extent  and  importance  "of  the  vast 
inland  navigation  of  these  United  States,"  that  should 
bring  that  great  western  valley  into  communication 
with  the  east,  and  that  he  would  not  rest  contented 
until  he  had  explored  that  western  country  and  tra- 
versed those  lines  which  have  given  bounds  to  a  new 
empire.  And  as  he  comes  back  over  the  Alleghanies 
from  this  journey  of  six  hundred  and  eighty  miles  on 
the  same  horses  he  writes:  "No  well-informed  mind 
need  be  told  how  necessary  it  is  to  apply  the  cement 
of  interest  to  bind  all  parts  together  by  one  indissoluble 
band."  And  the  indissoluble  band  is  the  smooth  road 
and  the  navigable  stream  or  canal.1 

England  and  France  had  both  restrained  western 
migration,  and  the  young  provincial  republic  was 
doubtless  of  no  mind  to  encourage  it,  so  far  as  it  then 
knew  its  mind.  But  Washington  had  a  larger,  wiser 
view  than  any  other  except  Franklin,  and  even  Frank- 
lin was  not  ardent  for  the  canals.  Washington  was 
thinking,  some  will  say,  of  the  trade  that  would  come 
over  those  paths;  and  so  he  was,  but  it  was  not  prima- 
rily for  his  own  advantage,  not  for  the  trade's  sake,  but 

*A.  B.  Hulbert,  "Washington  and  the  West,"  p.  ioo. 


326    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

for  the  sake  of  the  weak  little  confederation  of  States 
for  which  he  had  ventured  all  he  was  and  had. 

He  was  (as  my  old  professor  of  history  in  Johns  Hop- 
kins was  the  first  to  point  out1)  the  first  to  suggest  the 
parcelling  of  the  western  country  into  "free,  conve- 
nient, and  independent  governments,"  and  here  he  ap- 
pears the  first  not  to  speculate  about  but  to  seek  out 
by  fording  streams  and  climbing  mountains  a  practical 
way  to  a  "more  perfect  union,"  and  not  merely  for 
those  jealous  States  lying  along  the  Atlantic  and  within 
reach  of  its  commerce,  but  for  all  the  territory  and 
people  of  their  new  heritage. 

And  singularly  enough  this  very  journey  led  not 
only  to  the  establishment  of  those  paths  between  the 
east  and  west,  the  national  road,  the  canals  reaching 
toward  the  sources  of  the  rivers,  and  ultimately  the 
trans-Alleghany  railroad,  but  to  the  making  of  that 
unmatched  document,  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States.     And  in  this  wise: 

Washington  called  the  attention  of  Virginia  and 
Maryland  to  the  importance  of  opening  a  communica- 
tion between  the  Potomac  and  James  and  the  western 
waters.  He  writes  to  Lafayette  of  being  at  the  meeting 
of  the  Maryland  Assembly  in  that  interest.2  These 
two  States  appointed  commissioners  to  confer  concern- 
ing this  and  other  matters.  Their  recommendations 
resulted  in  the  calling  of  a  more  widely  representative 
convention,  and  this  in  turn  in  the  convening  of  a  body 
to  revise  the  entire  federal  system. 

1  Herbert  B.  Adams,  "Washington's  Interests  in  Western  Lands,"  in 
Johns  Hopkins  University  Studies.     Third  series,  No.  I,  1885. 

2  John  Pickell,  "New  Chapter  in  the  Early  Life  of  Washington  in  Con- 
nection with  the  Narrative  History  of  the  Potomac  Company,  1856,"  pp. 
133-4. 


WASHINGTON  327 

So  this  peaceful  journey  of  the  warrior  over  the  moun- 
tains to  the  great  meadows  and  down  into  the  tangled 
ravines  of  West  Virginia  became  not  only  the  prophecy 
of  the  indissoluble  bond  between  the  east  and  west; 
it  became  the  first  step  in  that  movement  which  led 
the  original  States  themselves  into  that  more  perfect 
union. 

The  sequence,  which  did  not  occur  to  me  until  I  read 
recently  the  diary  of  that  trans-Alleghany  journey, 
gives  Washington  a  new,  if  a  homelier,  majesty. 

Napoleon  the  Great  has  spoken  his  praise  of  Washing- 
ton as  a  general.  Many  of  our  own  historians  agree  that 
it  is  very  doubtful  if  without  Washington  the  struggle 
for  independence  would  have  succeeded.  Other  men 
were  important.  He  was  indispensable.  This  intimates 
the  occasion  we  have  for  gratitude  that  the  commander 
of  the  French  let  him  march  out  of  Fort  Necessity 
in  1754. 

The  world  has  for  a  century  been  repeating  the 
eulogies  that  have  outlived  the  invective  of  his  day — 
and  that  are  only  now  becoming  humanized  by  the 
new  school  of  historians  who  will  not  sacrifice  facts  to 
glowing  periods.  Washington  is  now  more  of  a  human 
being  and  less  of  a  god  than  the  Washington  whom 
Lincoln  found  in  Weems's  "Life." 

Yet  with  all  the  humanizing  is  he  the  austere,  rugged, 
inaccessible  mountain,  its  fiery  passions  hidden,  its 
head  above  the  forests.  And  so  will  he  stand  in  history 
the  justest  of  men,  a  man  of  highest  purity  of  purpose 
and  of  greatest  practical  wisdom;  but,  if  as  a  mountain, 
then  as  one  that  hides  somewhere  in  its  slopes  such  a 
path  as  we  have  learned  to  know  in  our  journeys  over 
this  course,  a  portage  path  between  two  great  valleys 


328     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

which  its  summit  has  blessed,  for  he  was  as  a  portage 
path  between  the  eastern  and  western  waters,  between 
the  institutions  of  New  England  and  the  fleur-de-lis 
fields  of  Nouvelle  France. 

I  have  visited  the  unmarked  field  where  Fort  Le 
Boeuf  once  stood,  by  French  Creek,  the  field  where 
"the  most  momentous  and  far-reaching  question  ever 
brought  to  issue  on  this  [American]  continent"1  was 
put  by  the  stripling  Washington  to  the  veteran  Legar- 
deur  de  St.  Pierre. 

I  have,  in  my  worship  of  the  great  general,  followed 
through  the  rain  and  sleet  of  a  winter's  night  and  in 
the  mud  of  a  country  road  his  famous  march  from  the 
crossing  of  the  Delaware  to  Trenton,  made  in  that 
December  night  of  1776  when  the  struggle  seemed  most 
hopeless. 

And  I  have  been  in  the  place  in  which — as  to  at 
least  one  historian — he  seems  to  me  the  most  of  a  man 
and  the  most  of  a  prophet,  even  the  most  of  a  god, 
out  in  the  glades  and  passes,  the  rains  and  fogs,  of 
the  Alleghanies,  fording  the  streams  and  following  the 
paths  of  buffalo  and  deer  in  an  attempt  to  find  a  way 
between  the  east  and  west. 

1  Parkman,  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe,"  1  :  4. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
THE   PRODUCERS 

ON  the  wonderful  background  which  the  passing 
life  of  that  valley  has  filled  with  dim  epic  fig- 
ures that  are  now  but  the  incarnations  of  Euro- 
pean longings,  as  rich  in  color  as  that  which  lies  more 
consciously  back  of  Greece  and  Rome  or  in  the  fields 
of  Gaul  (the  splendors  of  the  court  of  Versailles  shining 
through  the  sombre  forests  and  into  the  huts  of  the 
simple  habitants) — on  this  I  have  depicted  the  rather 
shadowy  suggestions  of  a  matter-of-fact,  drab  de- 
mocracy which  is  usually  made  to  obscure  all  that 
background  with  its  smoke.  But  if  I  have  made  your 
eyes  see  what  I  have  tried  to  show,  the  colors  and  figures 
of  the  background  still  show  themselves. 

I  have  now  to  put  against  that  wonderful  back- 
ground, dim  as  it  is,  the  new  habitants.  I  suggested 
earlier  the  emergence  of  their  gaunt  figures  from  the 
forests  and  the  processional  of  their  ships  of  the  prairies 
through  the  tall  grass  that  seemed  as  the  sea  itself. 

I  had  in  my  thought  to  speak  of  these  new  inhabi- 
tants as  workers,  but  that  word  has  in  it  too  much  of 
the  suggestion  of  endless,  hopeless,  playless  labor.  Yet 
they  are  workers  all — or  nearly  all.  There  are  some 
tramps,  vagrants,  idlers,  to  be  sure,  the  spray  of  that 
restless  sea.  But  when  a  man  of  great  wealth  wishes 
to  give  up  systematic  work  he  generally  goes  out  of  the 

329 


33Q    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

valley  or  begins  a  migratory  life,  as  do  the  wild  birds 
of  the  valley. 

But  these  busy,  ever-working  people  of  the  valley 
are  better  characterized  by  other  names,  and  they  may 
be  divided  into  three  overlapping  classes: 

I.  The  precursors,  those  that  run  before,  the  ex- 
plorers, the  discoverers,  the  inventors,  the  prophets. 

II.  The  producers,  those,  literally,  who  lead  forth: 
the  dukes,  marshals,  generals  of  democracy,  bringers 
forth  of  things  from  the  ground,  the  waters,  by  brain 
and  muscle;  and  the  transporters  of  the  things  brought 
forth  to  the  places  of  need. 

III.  The  poets,  that  is,  in  the  old  pristine  Greek 
sense,  the  makers,  the  creators,  in  the  generic  sense, 
and  not  merely  in  the  specific  sense  of  makers  of  verses. 

If  you  object  to  my  terminology  as  exalting  too 
much  the  common  man,  as  putting  sacred  things  to 
profane  use,  as  demeaning  prophecy  and  nobility  and 
poesy,  I  shall  answer  that  it  is  because  of  the  narrowing 
definitions  of  convention  that  only  the  makers  of 
verses,  and  not  all  of  those,  are  poets,  that  only  men  of 
certain  birth  or  ancestry  or  favor  are  dukes,  and  that 
prophets  have  entirely  disappeared.  And  I  bring  to 
my  support  the  more  liberal  lexicography  of  science, 
whose  spectroscopy  now  admits  the  humblest  elements 
into  the  society  of  the  stars;  whose  microscopy,  as 
Maeterlinck  has  helped  us  to  become  aware,  has  per- 
mitted the  flowers  to  share  the  aspirations  of  animal 
intelligence;  whose  chemistry  has  gathered  the  elements 
into  a  social  democracy  in  which  no  permanent  aris- 
tocracy seems  now  to  be  possible,  except  that  of  ser- 
vice to  man;  whose  physics  has  divided  the  atom  and 
yet  exalted  it  to  a  place  which  would  lead  Lucretius, 


THE  PRODUCERS  331 

were  he  writing  now,  to  include  it  in  Natura  Deorum 
instead  of  Natura  Rerum. 

The  son  of  Sirach,  in  his  Book  of  Wisdom,  has  de- 
scribed the  man  who  did  the  work  of  the  world  in  an- 
cient times;  for  "how  shall  he  become  wise,"  begins 
this  essay,  "that  holdeth  the  plough,  that  glorieth  in 
the  shaft  of  the  goad,  that  driveth  oxen,  and  is  oc- 
cupied in  their  labors,  and  whose  discourse  is  of  the 
stock  of  bulls  ?  He  will  set  his  heart  upon  turning  his 
furrows,  his  wakefulness  is  to  give  his  heifers  their  fod- 
der. So  is  every  artificer  and  work-master  that  passeth 
his  time  by  night  as  by  day,  they  that  cut  gravings 
of  signets;  and  his  diligence  is  to  make  great  variety; 
he  will  set  his  heart  to  preserve  likeness  in  his  portrai- 
ture, and  will  be  wakeful  to  finish  his  work.  So  is  the 
smith,  sitting  by  the  anvil,  and  considering  the  un- 
wrought  iron;  the  vapor  of  the  fire  will  waste  his  flesh, 
and  in  the  heat  of  the  furnace  will  he  wrestle  with  his 
work;  the  noise  of  the  hammer  will  be  ever  in  his  ears, 
and  his  eyes  are  upon  the  pattern  of  the  vessel;  he  will 
set  his  heart  upon  perfecting  his  works,  and  he  will  be 
wakeful  to  adorn  them  perfectly.  So  is  the  potter 
sitting  at  his  work,  and  turning  the  wheel  about  with 
his  feet,  who  is  always  anxiously  set  at  his  work,  and 
all  his  handiwork  is  by  number;  he  will  fashion  the 
clay  with  his  arm,  and  will  bend  its  strength  in  front  of 
his  feet;  he  will  apply  his  heart  to  finish  the  glazing, 
and  he  will  be  wakeful  to  make  clean  the  furnace. 
All  these  put  their  trust  in  their  hands;  and  each  be- 
cometh  wise  in  his  own  work.  Without  these  shall 
not  a  city  be  inhabited,  and  men  shall  not  sojourn  or 
walk  up  or  down  therein.  They  shall  not  be  sought 
for  in  the  council  of  the  people,  and  in  the  assembly 


332     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

they  shall  not  mount  on  high;  they  shall  not  sit  on 
the  seat  of  the  judge,  and  they  shall  not  understand 
the  covenant  of  judgment;  neither  shall  they  declare 
instruction  and  judgment,  and  where  parables  are 
they  shall  not  be  found.  But  they  will  maintain  the 
fabric  of  the  world;  and  in  the  handiwork  of  their 
craft  is  their  prayer." 

The  wisdom  of  the  scribe,  however,  he  said,  "cometh 
by  opportunity  of  leisure."  That  wisdom  the  west, 
as  I  have  already  intimated,  has  not  yet  learned.  Such 
a  scene  as  I  witnessed  a  little  time  ago  in  the  amphi- 
theatre of  the  Sorbonne,  a  scene  typical  of  what  oc- 
curs many  times  a  day  there,  is  not  yet  to  be  seen  in 
the  valley.  I  saw  that  hall  filled  in  the  early  after- 
noon with  an  audience  markedly  masculine,  listening 
to  a  lecture  on  early  Greek  life,  interspersed  with  read- 
ings from  the  Homeric  epics.  I  cannot  visualize,  much 
as  I  could  wish  to,  a  like  scene  in  the  Mississippi 
Valley,  except  in  the  atmosphere  of  a  woman's  club, 
or  at  an  assembly  on  the  shore  of  the  lake  Chautauqua, 
which  I  have  described  in  the  narrative  of  the  "sow- 
ing of  the  leaden  plates,"  where  men  and  women  are 
for  a  little  time  shut  away  from  their  normal  occupa- 
tions in  a  fenced  or  walled  town;  or  in  a  university 
where  attendance  upon  the  lecture  is  required  for  a 
degree.  I  cannot  visualize  it  even  with  such  a  charm- 
ing and  amphionic  lecturer  as  the  great  scholar  who 
gave  the  lecture  on  Greece1  to  which  I  have  referred. 

It  is  that  want,  in  the  valley,  of  appreciation  of  the 
value  of  leisure  and  of  its  wisdoms,  it  is  that  worship 
of  what  the  son  of  Sirach  called  the  "wisdom  of  busi- 
ness," or  busyness,  it  is  that  disposition  not  to  listen 

1  Dean  Croiset. 


THE  PRODUCERS  333 

to  the  voices  of  the  invisible  multitude  of  spirits  of  the 
past  (who  after  all  help  to  constitute  a  nation  no  less 
than  the  multitude  of  spirits  of  the  present,  and  of 
the  future),  it  is  that  inability  to  credit  disinterested, 
materially  unproductive,  purposes  and  pursuits,  and 
fit  them  into  the  philosophy  of  a  perfectibility  based  on 
material  prosperity — it  is  all  of  these  that  intimate  the 
shortcomings  of  that  life  of  the  Valley  of  Hurry. 

I  saw  another  great  and,  as  it  seemed,  non-univer- 
sity audience  in  the  same  amphitheatre  in  Paris  listen- 
ing just  after  midday  to  a  lecture  on  Montesquieu,  and 
I  had  not  sufficient  imagination  to  picture  such  an 
audience  as  near  the  Stock  Exchange  of  Chicago  as 
the  Sorbonne  is  to  the  Bourse — in  that  western  city 
where  men  take  hardly  time  at  that  hour  of  day  to 
eat,  much  less  to  philosophize.  They  will  not  pause  to 
hear  Montesquieu  remind  them  that  "democracy  is 
virtue"  or  to  hear  Homer  speak  of  virtue  as  the  ancients 
conceived  it. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  and  there  is  another  side, 
they  will  give  up  private  business,  eating,  and  all  to 
stop  a  patent  dishonesty,  to  improve  the  mail  service, 
to  discuss  the  smoke  nuisance  that  happens  to  be 
choking  their  throats,  or  get  rid  of  the  beggar  at  the 
door,  or  to  go  to  a  ball  game. 

They  do  not  there  in  any  great  number  appreciate 
the  wonderful,  indefatigable,  disinterested  efforts  of 
scholars,  artists,  poets,  in  the  narrower  sense — the 
wisdoms  of  seeming  idleness  or  leisure.  On  the  other 
hand,  I  am  sure  that  the  poetry  and  prophecy  of  those 
who  (again  in  the  language  of  the  son  of  Sirach)  are 
"building  the  fabric  of  the  world"  are  not  appreciated 
either  in  Paris  or  Chicago,  partly  because  of  conven- 


334     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

tion  and  inadequate  representation  in  the  old  world, 
and  because  of  the  smoke  and  noise  and  the  thought 
of  the  "unwrought  iron"  in  the  new  world. 

Of  the  geographical  precursors  of  that  valley  I  have 
spoken.  But  there  are  others  who  have  enlarged  the 
boundaries  and  increased  the  size  of  acres  discovered 
by  the  first  precursors.  Let  me  without  fatiguing  sta- 
tistics give  intimation  of  what  I  mean  in  one  or  two 
illustrations  of  the  successors  of  the  coureurs  de  bois, 
the  runners  before,  the  later  prophets  of  the  valley. 

Out  of  a  trough  up  in  the  Alleghany  Mountains — 
one  of  those  troughs  occupied  by  the  sinewy  Scotch- 
Irish  pioneers  who  first,  after  the  French,  as  you  will 
recall,  crept  down  into  the  great  valley — there  jour- 
neyed one  day,  a  century  after  Celoron,  a  young  man 
on  horseback.  He  rode  as  many  miles  as  La  Salle 
went  on  foot  in  that  memorable  heart-breaking  jour- 
ney from  Fort  Crevecoeur  to  Fort  Frontenac.  He  rode 
through  the  territory  which  La  Salle  had  so  appeal- 
ingly  described  to  Louis  XIV,  now  yellow  with  ripe 
wheat.  Men  and  women,  children  and  grandmothers, 
were  toiling  day  and  night  with  scythes  and  sickles  to 
harvest  it  by  hand,  but  could  not  gather  it  all,  and 
tons  were  left  to  rot  under  the  "hoofs  of  cattle."1 

This  precursor  came  with  a  sword,  beaten  not  into 
a  ploughshare  but  into  a  something  quite  as  indispen- 

1  "He  saw  hogs  and  cattle  turned  Into  fields  of  ripe  wheat,  for  lack  of 
laborers  to  gather  it  in.  The  fertile  soil  had  given  Illinois  five  million 
bushels  of  wheat,  and  it  was  too  much.  It  was  more  than  the  sickle  and 
the  scythe  could  cut.  Men  toiled  and  sweltered  to  save  the  yellow  affluence 
from  destruction.  They  worked  by  day  and  by  night;  and  their  wives  and 
children  worked.  But  the  tragic  aspect  of  the  grain  crop  is  this — it  must 
be  gathered  quickly  or  it  breaks  down  and  decays.  It  will  not  wait.  The 
harvest  season  lasts  from  four  to  ten  days  only.  And  whoever  cannot 
snatch  his  grain  from  the  field  during  this  short  period  must  lose  it." — 
H.  N.  Casson,  "Cyrus  Hall  McCormick,"  pp.  65,  66. 


THE  PRODUCERS  335 

sable,  a  sickle — a  vibrating  sickle  driven  by  horses,  that 
would  in  a  day  do  the  work  of  a  dozen,  twenty,  thirty, 
forty  men,  women,  children,  and  grandmothers.  In 
his  eastern  home  he  had,  like  La  Salle,  suffered  from 
creditors,  from  jeering  neighbors  who  thought  him 
visionary,  if  not  crazed,  and  from  fearful  laborers  who 
broke  his  machines;  but  there  in  that  golden  western 
valley  he  found  sympathy,  and,  on  the  Chicago  por- 
tage, a  site  for  the  making  of  his  sickles,  fitted  into 
machines  called  harvesters — there  where  the  French 
precursor's  boat  and  sword  were  found  not  long  ago. 
Seventeen  years  later,  on  his  imperial  farm,  Napoleon 
III  (whose  royal  ancestors  had  given  the  very  site  for 
the  factory)  fastened  the  cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor 
upon  the  breast  of  this  prophet. 

There  were  others  who  went  with  him  or  followed 
him  into  that  richer  valley,  adding  the  self-rake  to  the 
sickle,  then  putting  a  platform  on  the  harvester  so 
that  the  men  who  bound  the  sheaves  had  no  longer 
to  walk  and  bend  over  the  grain  on  the  ground,  as  they 
had  done  since  before  the  days  of  Ruth  and  Naomi, 
then  devising  an  iron  arm  to  take  the  place  of  one  of 
flesh,  and  finally  putting  a  piece  of  twine  in  the  hand 
of  that  iron  arm  and  making  it  do  the  work  of  the 
binder.  I  cannot  help  wondering  what  Tonty  of  the 
iron  hand  would  have  said  could  he  have  seen  that 
half-human  machine  cutting  the  wheat,  and  with  its 
iron  hand  tying  it  in  bundles,  there  in  the  fields  of 
Aramoni,  just  back  of  the  Rock  St.  Louis. 

But  I  do  not  need  to  idealize  or  emphasize  to  men  of 
France  the  service  of  this  particular  precursor,  who  was 
for  years  considering  the  unwrought  iron,  making  ex- 
periment after  experiment  before  he  came  down  into 


336    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

that  golden  valley,  literally  to  multiply  its  acres  a 
hundredfold;  for  the  French  Academy  of  Science  de- 
clared that  he  had  "done  more  for  the  cause  of  agri- 
culture than  any  other  living  man,"  and  a  late  Presi- 
dent of  the  French  Republic  is  quoted  as  saying  that 
without  this  harvester  "France  would  starve."  The 
King  of  Spain,  the  Emperor  of  Germany,  the  Czar  of 
Russia,  the  Sultan  of  Turkey,  and  the  Shah  of  Persia 
have  added  their  tributes  to  those  of  the  President  of 
the  French  Republic,  and  all  the  nations  of  the  earth 
are  literally  bringing  their  glory  and  their  honor  into 
that  city  of  the  portage  strip,  which,  in  a  sense,  has 
leading  across  and  out  of  it  paths  to  all  the  other 
golden  valleys  of  the  earth,  for  we  are  told  that  the 
sickles  are  reaping  the  fields  of  "Argentina  in  January, 
Upper  Egypt  in  February,  East  India  in  March, 
Mexico  in  April,  China  in  May,  Spain  in  June,  Iowa  in 
July,  Canada  in  August,  Sweden  in  September,  Nor- 
way in  October,  South  Africa  in  November,  and  Burma 
in  December." 

When  in  France,  walking  one  afternoon  from  Orange 
to  Avignon,  the  first  object  I  saw  as  I  entered  that 
charming  city  of  the  palace  of  the  Pope  was  a  sign  ad- 
vertising the  McCormick  harvester. 

I  do  not  mean  to  intimate  that  all  the  sickles,  that 
is,  harvesters,  are  made  on  that  portage  strip,  for  if 
all  the  factories  and  coal  lands  (twenty  thousand  acres) 
and  timber  lands  (one  hundred  thousand  acres)  and  ore 
lands  (with  their  forty  million  tons  of  ore)  and  railway 
tracks  that  unite  to  make  these  harvesters  were  brought 
together  around  that  portage  strip  there  would  be  no 
place  for  the  city  itself;  but  through  one  building  on 
that  strip  the  myriad  paths  do  run,  connecting  all  the 


THE  PRODUCERS  337 

tillable,  grain-growing  valleys  of  this  planet;  and  yet 
a  recent,  most  observing  English  critic,  Mr.  Wells, 
saw  as  he  left  that  city  only  a  "great  industrial  deso- 
lation" netted  by  railroads.  He  smelled  an  unwhole- 
some reek  from  the  stock-yards,  and  saw  a  bituminous 
reek  that  outdoes  London,  with  vast  chimneys  right  and 
left,  "huge  blackened  grain-elevators,  flame-crowned 
furnaces,  and  gauntly  ugly  and  filthy  factory  build- 
ings, monstrous  mounds  of  refuse,  desolate,  empty 
lots,  littered  with  rusty  cans,  old  iron,  and  indescrib- 
able rubbish.  Interspersed  with  these  are  groups  of 
dirty,  disreputable,  insanitary-looking  wooden  houses."1 
Nothing  but  these  in  a  place  whose  very  smoke  was  a 
sign  of  what  had  made  it  possible  for  the  nations  of 
the  earth  even  to  subsist  at  all  in  any  such  numbers, 
or  if  at  all,  on  anything  better  than  black  bread. 

And,  after  all,  this  precursor,  this  runner  before,  was 
but  one  of  hundreds  of  later  Champlains,  Nicolets,  and 
La  Salles,  in  the  wake  of  whose  visions  came  the  pro- 
ducers, those  who  led  forth  the  corn  and  wheat  from 
the  furrows,  the  trees  from  the  forests,  the  coal  from 
the  ground,  the  iron  from  the  hills,  the  steel  from  the 
retorts,  the  fire  from  the  wells,  the  water  from  the 
mountains,  electricity  from  the  clouds  and  the  cataract 
— dukes,  field-marshals,  generals,  demigods  whom  no 
myth  has  enhaloed  or  poetry  immortalized. 

Prometheus,  bringing  fire  to  mortals,  did  in  a  more 
primitive  way  what  they  have  done  who  have  led  forth 
the  oil  of  the  rocks  (petroleum)  to  light  the  lamps  of 
the  earth.  Orpheus,  who  sang  so  entrancingly  that 
mortals  forgot  their  punishments  and  followed  him, 
and  Amphion,  who  drew  the  stones  into  their  places 

1  H.  G.  Wells,  "Future  in  America,"  p.  59. 


338     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

in  the  walls  by  his  music,  performed  no  more  of  a 
miracle  than  a  lad  who  tips  a  Bessemer  converter. 
Hercules  is  remembered  as  a  hero  of  the  garden  of  the 
Hesperides  for  all  time,  whereas  he  probably  but  im- 
ported oranges  from  Spain  to  the  eastern  Mediter- 
ranean, and  is  hardly  to  be  mentioned  by  the  side  of 
such  a  Mississippi  Valley  transporter  and  importer  as 
Mr.  Hill. 

But  let  us  follow  more  particularly  the  producers 
of  the  fields,  whom  we  call  the  farmers  there,  the  men 
whom  the  son  of  Sirach  had  in  mind  when  he  said  in 
the  ancient  days:  "How  shall  he  become  wise  that 
holdeth  the  plough,  that  glorieth  in  the  shaft  of  the 
goad,  .  .  .  and  whose  discourse  is  of  the  stock  of 
bulls?"  It  was  a  farmer's  son  who  invented  the  har- 
vester, and  four-fifths  of  the  men  (whom  the  writer,  to 
whom  I  am  indebted  for  many  of  these  facts  about 
the  farmer,  calls  "harvester  kings") — along  with  the 
plough  kings  and  wagon  kings  of  whom  democracy  has 
been  dreaming — were  farmers'  sons.  The  plough,  the 
self-binder,  the  thresher  were  all  invented  on  the  farm. 

The  son  of  Sirach  said:  "They  shall  not  be  sought  for 
in  the  council  of  the  people,  and  in  the  assembly  they 
shall  not  mount  on  high";  but  fourteen  of  the  first 
twenty-six  Presidents  were  farmers'  sons,  and  that 
statistic  gives  but  merest  suggestion  of  the  farmer's 
part  in  all  the  councils  of  the  people. 

Here  are  a  few  significant,  graphic  facts  which  would 
furnish  interesting  material  for  a  new  edition  of  Vir- 
gil's "Georgics"  and  "Bucolics"  or  lead  Horace  to  re- 
vise his  verses  on  rural  life. 

There  are  practically  five  times  as  many  farmers 
(under  the  early  man-power  definition  of  the  farmer)  as 


THE   PRODUCERS  339 

the  census  shows,  for  the  farmer  now  works  with  the 
old-time  power  of  five  men. 

Six  per  cent  of  the  human  race  (and  the  larger  part 
of  that  six  per  cent  is  in  the  Mississippi  Valley)  pro- 
duces one-fifth  of  the  wheat  of  the  world,  two-thirds  of 
the  cotton,  and  three  fourths  of  the  corn  (and  this 
takes  no  account  of  its  reapers  and  mowers  that  gather 
the  crops  in  other  valleys). 

It  would  cost  three  hundred  million  dollars  more  to 
harvest  the  world's  wheat  by  hand,  if  it  were  possible, 
than  it  costs  now  by  the  aid  of  the  harvester  and  reaper.1 

Some  years  ago  in  a  trial  made  in  Germany  in  the 
presence  of  the  Emperor  and  his  ministers,  it  was 
shown  that  a  Mississippi  Valley  harvester  driven  by 
one  man  could  do  more  in  one  day  than  forty  Polish 
women  with  old-fashioned  sickles.2 

The  precursor  of  the  harvester  saw  grandmothers 
and  mothers  in  the  fields  working  day  and  night  to 
cut  and  gather  the  harvest,  but  he  could  not  now 
(except  among  the  new  immigrant  farmers)  see  that 
spectacle.  I  cannot  recall  that,  until  I  met  that  old- 
world  population  coming  over  the  mountains  as  I 
made  my  first  journey  east  out  of  that  valley,  over 
twenty  years  ago,  I  ever  saw  a  woman  at  work  in  the 
fields. 

The  gallantry  of  that  primitive  pioneer  life  kept 
her  in  the  cabin,  which  was  the  castle,  and,  while  her 
labor  was  doubtless  not  less  than  her  husband's,  it  had 
the  sanctity  of  its  seclusion  and  its  maternal  ministries 
to  life.  In  the  new  industrialism  that  has  invited  the 
daughters  of  the  Polish  women  harvesters   into  the 

1H.  N.  Casson,  "Romance  of  the  Reaper,"  p.  178. 

*H.  N.  Casson,  "Romance  of  the  Reaper,"  pp.  134,  135. 


34Q    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

factories  yonder  there  is  this  constant  and  increasing 
concern  which  is  insisting  upon  a  living  wage,  whole- 
some sanitary  environment,  and  on  shorter  hours  of 
labor  for  women  and  children — this  purpose  that  will 
ultimately  bring  skies  and  sunsets  without  exposure  or 
back-breaking  labor. 

On  my  way  to  a  provincial  university  in  the  north 
of  France  not  long  ago,  I  saw  a  peasant  mother  standing 
in  the  misty  morning  at  the  mouth  of  a  small  thresher, 
feeding  into  it  the  sheaves  handed  her  by  her  husband, 
the  horse  in  a  treadmill  furnishing  the  power.  When 
I  passed  in  the  misty  morning  of  the  next  day  she  was 
still  feeding  the  yellow  sheaves  into  the  thresher;  and 
I  thought  how  much  better  that  was  than  the  flail. 

On  a  farm  in  the  northwest,  a  hundred  miles  square, 
as  long  ago  as  1893,  three  hundred  self-binders  were 
reaping  the  wheat  at  the  cost  of  less  than  a  cent  a 
bushel — with  practically  no  human  labor  beyond 
driving,1  and  there  are  seven  thousand  harvesting  ma- 
chines made  each  week2  by  the  one  great  harvester 
company  alone. 

The  time  needed  to  handle  an  acre  of  wheat  has 
been  reduced  by  the  use  of  machinery  from  sixty-one 
hours  to  three;  of  an  acre  of  hay  from  twenty-one  to 
four;  of  oats  from  sixty-six  to  seven;  of  potatoes  from 
one  hundred  and  nine  to  thirty-eight — which  is  signifi- 
cant in  its  promise  of  the  wisdoms  of  leisure.3 

But  machinery  has  also  increased  the  size  of  the 
farm.  In  France  and  Germany,  I  am  told,  the  average 
farm  is  but  five  acres  in  size,  and  in  England  nine; 

JH.  N.  Casson,  "Romance  of  the  Reaper,"  p.  178. 
2  H.  N.  Casson,  "  Cyrus  Hall  McCormick,"  p.  196. 
JH.  N.  Casson,  "Romance  of  the  Reaper,"  p.  179. 


THE  PRODUCERS  341 

while  in  the  United  States  it  is  one  hundred  and  thirty- 
eight  acres,  and  in  the  States  west  of  the  Mississippi 
two  hundred  and  eleven  acres. 

And  the  product  ?  One  harvest,  in  the  picturesque 
words  of  Mr.  Casson,  would  buy  Belgium,  two  would 
buy  Italy,  three  would  buy  Austria-Hungary,  and  five, 
at  a  spot-cash  price,  would  take  Russia  from  the  Czar. 
Seven  bushels  of  wheat  for  every  man,  woman,  and 
child  of  the  ninety  or  more  millions  in  America  and  a 
thousand  million  dollars'  worth  of  food  to  other  nations  ! 
That  is  the  sum  of  the  product — of  what  has  been  led 
forth  in  a  single  year. 

But  the  leader  forth,  the  producer,  the  man  who 
set  his  heart  upon  "turning  his  furrows,"  whose  "wake- 
fulness was  to  give  heifers  their  fodder,"  he  has  himself 
risen.  He  has,  as  I  said  of  the  farmers  of  Aramoni 
(the  sons  of  the  first  settlers  who  are  still  turning  up 
occasionally  a  flint  arrow-head  in  the  fields) — he  has 
his  daily  paper,  his  daily  mail,  his  telephone.  He 
"pays  his  taxes  with  a  week's  earnings."  He  ploughs, 
plants,  sows,  cultivates,  reaps  by  machinery.  The 
poet  Gray  could  find  only  with  difficulty  in  that  valley 
a  footsore  ploughman  homeward  wending  his  weary 
way,  and  Millet  would  in  vain  look  for  a  sower,  a  man 
with  a  hoe,  a  woman  reaper  with  a  sickle,  a  man  with 
a  scythe  or  cradle.  The  new-world  peasant  is  not 
only  maintaining  more  than  his  per-capita  share  of  the 
"fabric  of  the  world"  but  he  is  taking  his  place  in  the 
councils  of  men. 

What  is  most  promising  now  is  that  these  followers 
of  the  old  pioneers  of  France  in  that  valley  are  be- 
ginning to  add  to  their  acres  new  dominions,  discovered 
by  the  new  pioneers  of  France,  such  as  the  chemists 


342    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

Lavoisier  and  Berthelot,  forerunners  of  the  modern 
schools  of  agricultural  chemistry  and  physical  chemis- 
try. One  hundred  years  after  La  Salle  completed  the 
waterway  journey  to  the  gulf  through  that  valley, 
Lavoisier  made  a  discovery  of  the  composition  of  water 
itself  that  has  been  of  immense  benefit,  I  am  told,  to 
the  farmer  of  that  valley  and  of  other  valleys.  And 
then  came  Berthelot  with  his  teaching  of  how  to  put 
together  again,  to  synthetize,  what  man  has  waste- 
fully  dissipated.  France's  men  of  the  lens  and  the 
retort  have  become  precursors  where  France's  men  of 
the  boat  and  the  sword  went  first,  and  have  opened 
paths  to  even  richer  fields  than  those  in  which  the  har- 
vesters have  reaped. 

There  are  as  many  agricultural  colleges  in  the  United 
States  as  there  are  States;  there  are  at  least  fifty  agri- 
cultural experiment  stations,  and  there  is  ever  new 
provision  for  scientific  agricultural  research. 

Here  is  a  partial  catalogue  of  the  enactments  and 
appropriations  of  the  legislature  in  the  valley  States 
for  two  years  only: 

Laws  and  Appropriations  Showing  Work  Done  in  Agri- 
cultural Experiment  and  Extension  Work  by 
Certain  of  the  States,  1911-14. 

ALABAMA 

1912. — $27,000,  experiments  with  fertilizers,  combating  boll- 
weevil,  plant  breeding,  horticultural  investi- 
gations, agricultural  extension,  etc. 

1913. — Same  as  for  1912. 

COLORADO 
1911-12. — $5,500,  experiments  with  potatoes. 

5,000,  experiments  with  alfalfa,  grain,  etc. 
3,500,  dry  farming. 


THE  PRODUCERS  343 

1913. — $47,500,  experimental  work  in  dry  farming,  dairy- 
ing, etc. 

1913-14. — County  commissioners,  on  petition  of  one  hundred 
taxpayers,  to  appoint  county  agriculturist; 
salary  paid  by  county  and  expenses  by  county, 
State,  and  United  States. 

ILLINOIS 

191 3. — Authorized  counties  to  appropriate  $5,000  annually 
for  soil  and  crop  improvement. 

See  "American  Year  Book,  1913,"  p.  466. 

IOWA 

191 3. — $500,  cross-breeding  of  fruits  and  edible  nuts.     Au- 
thorizing establishment  of  county  corpora- 
tions for  improvement  of  agriculture. 
40,000,  experiment  station. 
10,000,  veterinary  investigation. 
17,000,  experimental  farm. 
40,000,  agricultural  extension. 

See  "American  Year  Book,  1913,"  p.  465. 

KANSAS 

1913-14. — $55,000,  experiment  station. 

15,000,  production    and    dissemination    of    im- 
proved seeds. 
102,500,   for  six  branch  stations,  two  of  which  are 

new. 
125,000,  pumping-plants  at  experiment  station. 

LOUISIANA 

1912. — Police  juries  of  several  parishes  authorized  to  appro- 
priate not  to  exceed  $1,000  annually  in  aid  of 
farmers'  co-operative  demonstration  work;  also 
to  acquire  and  establish  experimental  farms. 

MICHIGAN 

191 2. — Authorizing  and  regulating  county  agricultural  de- 
partments for  advice  and  assistance  to  farmers. 

MINNESOTA 

1913. — $60,000,  maintenance  of  county  agricultural  agents; 
counties  each  to  pay  $1,000. 


344    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

MISSOURI 
1913-14. — $25,000,  county  farm  advisers. 
20,000,  soil  experiments. 
30,000,  agricultural  investigations. 

5,000,  promotion  of  corn  growing. 
12,000,  soil  survey. 
50,000,  hog-cholera  serum  work. 

2,500,  orchard  demonstration. 
10,000,  agricultural  laboratories. 
12,000,  animal  husbandry. 

5,000,  dairying. 

MONTANA 

191 2. — $20,000,  demonstration  of  dry-land  farming. 

1913. — County  commissioners  may,  upon  vote  of  51  per  cent 
of  electors,  appropriate  $100  per  month  for 
agricultural  instructor,  remainder  of  salary  to 
be  paid  by  State  and  United  States. 

NEBRASKA 

1911-12. — $100,000,  establishment  of  school  of  agriculture. 

3,000,  agricultural  botanical  work. 
1913-14. —    $3,000,  agricultural  botanical  work.    County  to 
employ  farm  demonstrator  on  petition 
of  10  per  cent  of  farm-land  owners. 
1,250  (maximum),  annually  to  each  accred- 
ited high  school  teaching  agriculture, 
manual  training,  and  home  economics. 
85,000,  for    fireproof   building    for    agronomy, 
horticulture,    botany,    and    entomol- 
ogy. 

OHIO 

1913. — $229,200,  aggregate  of  station  appropriation. 

OKLAHOMA 

1913. — Counties  authorized  to  appropriate  $500  annually 
for  farmers'  demonstration  work. 
See  "American  Year  Book,  1913,"  pp.  465-6. 


THE  PRODUCERS  345 

TEXAS 

1911. — Authorizing  county  commissioners'  courts  to  estab- 
lish experimental  farms. 
1913. — Railroads  may  own  and  operate  experimental  farms. 

WISCONSIN 

1913. — Beginning  January  1,  1914,  $10,000,  county  agricul- 
tural representatives,  agricultural  develop- 
ment, etc. 

WYOMING 

1912. — $4,000,  agriculture  and  soil-culture  experiments. 
1913. — $4,000,  experiments  along  lines  of  agriculture  and  soil 
culture. 
5,000,  purchase  and  maintenance  of  experimental 
farm. 
1914-15. — $5,000,  dry-farm  experiments. 

See  "American  Year  Book,  1913,"  p.  466. 

And  nearly  every  State  availed  itself  by  specific  act 
of  certain  appropriations  under  a  federal  grant.  In 
addition  to  all  this,  appropriations  are  generally  made 
for  the  holding  of  farmers'  institutes  at  which  instruc- 
tion is  given  by  experts  and  farmers  exchange  experi- 
ences. 

The  agricultural  colleges  have  a  total  of  over  one 
hundred  thousand  graduates,  men  and  women,  and  it  is 
they,  and  those  who  follow  in  increasing  numbers,  who 
are  to  cultivate  the  valley  of  Lavoisier  and  Berthelot 
even  as  the  pioneers  and  producers  of  the  past  have 
cultivated  for  the  world  the  valley  of  Marquette  and 
La  Salle. 

It  is  not  all  as  bright  and  promising  as  this  rather 
generalized  picture  may  seem  to  indicate.  There  are 
still  isolations,  there  are  bad  crops  in  unfavorable 
places  and  untoward  seasons.    There  are  human  fail- 


346    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

ures.  It  is  an  intimation  of  the  darker  side  that  Presi- 
dent Roosevelt  appointed  a  commission1  a  few  years 
ago  to  see  what  could  be  done  for  the  ignorances,  the 
lonesomenesses,  the  monotonies  of  country  life  in  Amer- 
ica, and  to  prevent  the  migration  to  cities,  even  as 
Louis  XIV.  But  all  that  I  have  described  is  there 
— aggressively,  blusteringly,  optimistically  there — and 
is  going  most  confidently  on.  It  is  for  the  most  part 
a  temperate  life.  All  through  that  valley  there  has 
swept  a  movement,  moral,  economic,  or  both,  which 
has  closed  saloons  and  prevented  the  sale  of  intoxicat- 
ing drink  of  any  sort  in  States  or  communities  all  the 
way  from  the  lakes  to  the  gulf. 

But,  singularly  enough,  there  is  promise  of  a  new  age 
of  alcohol,  I  am  told.  Farmers  can  distil  a  variety  of 
alcohol  from  potatoes  at  a  cost  of  ten  cents  a  gallon 
and  use  it  in  gasolene  engines  most  profitably,  which 
leads  one  who  has  written  most  informingly  and  hope- 
fully of  the  American  farmer  to  foreshadow  the  day 
when  the  farmer  "will  grow  his  own  power  and 
know  how  to  harness  for  his  own  use  the  omnipotence 
of  the  soil"  and  get  its  fruits  most  beneficially  distrib- 
uted. 

That  there  is  a  strong  utilitarian  spirit  possessing 
all  the  valley  I  do  not  deny.  But  I  often  wonder 
whether  we  are  not  conventionally  astigmatic  to  much 
of  the  beauty  and  moral  value  of  such  utilitarian  life 
and  its  disciplines.  There  is  intimation  of  this  in  a 
recent  statement  of  a  western  economist  to  the  effect 
that  there  was  as  great  cultural  value  in  developing 
the  lines  of  a  perfect  milk  cow  as  in  studying  a  Venus 
de  Milo,  and  in  growing  a  perfect  ear  of  corn  as  in  rep- 

1  Commission  on  Country  Life. 


THE  PRODUCERS  347 

resenting  it  by  means  of  color  or  expressing  the  rhythm 
of  its  growth  in  metered  words.  But,  I  believe  that 
there  is  as  much  beauty  and  poetry  there  as  among 
the  isles  of  Greece,  if  only  it  were  interpreted  by  the 
disinterested  spirit  and  skill  of  the  artist,  the  scholar, 
and  the  poet. 

If  we  turn  for  a  moment  to  the  precursors  who  have 
led  the  way  to  the  valley  that  lies  beneath,  the  valley 
of  the  strata  of  coal  and  iron,  with  its  subterranean 
streams  of  precious  metal,  its  currents  of  gold  and  silver, 
and  its  lakes  of  oil  and  gas,  and  from  these  precursors 
to  the  producers  and  transporters  who  have  led  these 
elements  forth  to  the  uses  of  man,  we  shall  find  a  like 
story — another  chapter  of  democracy's  dreaming  of 
kings. 

The  same  author  whom  I  have  quoted  liberally 
above  has  written  what  he  calls  "The  Romance  of 
Steel"  in  that  valley.  It  begins  with  an  Englishman 
of  French  ancestry,  Bessemer,  and  one  Kelly,  an  Irish- 
American,  born  on  the  old  Fort  Duquesne  point.  They 
had  discovered  and  developed,  each  without  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  other,  the  pneumatic  process  of  treating 
iron — that  is,  of  refining  it  with  air  and  making  steel. 
Bessemer's  name  became  associated  with  the  process. 
But  the  industry  has  made  Kelly's  birthplace,  the  site 
of  the  old  French  fort,  its  capital  (with  another  of 
those  poetic  fitnesses  that  multiply  as  we  put  the  pres- 
ent against  the  past). 

France  not  only  gave  to  Pittsburgh  her  site  but  the 
crucibles  in  which  her  fortunes  lay.  Bessemer  was 
the  son  of  a  French  artist  living  in  London  in  poverty. 
Young  Bessemer  had  invented  many  devices,  when 
Napoleon  III,  one  day  in  a  conversation,  complained 


348     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

to  him  that  the  metal  used  in  making  cannon  was  of 
poor  quality  and  expensive.  He  began  experiments 
in  London  at  the  Emperor's  suggestion  and  later 
sent  the  Emperor  a  toy  cannon  of  his  own  making. 
It  was  in  this  experimenting,  as  I  infer,  that  the  idea 
struck  him  of  making  malleable  iron  by  introducing 
air  into  the  fluid  metal.  But  his  first  experiments  were 
not  particularly  encouraging,  and  when  he  read  a 
paper  on  the  process  of  manufacturing  steel  without 
fuel  before  the  British  Association  for  the  Advance- 
ment of  Science,  it  is  said  that  every  British  steelmaker 
roared  with  laughter  at  the  "crazy  Frenchman"  and 
that  it  was  voted  not  to  mention  his  silly  paper  in  the 
minutes  of  the  association.1 

To-day,  on  the  same  authority,  "there  are  more  than 
a  hundred  Bessemer  converters  in  the  United  States," 
and  they  "breathe  iron  into  steel  at  the  rate  of  eight- 
een billion  pounds  a  year" — "two  and  a  quarter  mil- 
lions of  pounds  every  hour  of  the  day  and  night." 

With  their  companion  open-hearth  converters  and 

1  "On  the  13th  of  August,  1856,  the  author  had  the  honor  of  reading  a 
paper  before  the  mechanical  section  of  the  British  Association  at  Chelten- 
ham. This  paper,  entitled  'The  Manufacture  of  Malleable  Iron  and 
Steel  without  Fuel,'  was  the  first  account  that  appeared  shadowing  forth 
the  important  manufacture  now  generally  known  as  the  Bessemer  process. 

"It  was  only  through  the  earnest  solicitation  of  Mr.  George  Rennie,  the 
then  president  of  the  mechanical  section  of  this  association,  that  the  inven- 
tion was,  at  that  early  stage  of  its  development,  thus  prominently  brought 
forward;  and  when  the  author  reflects  on  the  amount  of  labor  and  expendi- 
ture of  time  and  money  that  were  found  to  be  still  necessary  before  any 
commercial  results  from  the  working  of  the  process  were  obtained,  he  has 
no  doubt  whatever  but  that,  if  the  paper  at  Cheltenham  had  not  then  been 
read,  the  important  system  of  manufacture  to  which  it  gave  rise  would  to 
this  hour  have  been  wholly  unknown." 

Henry  Bessemer,  "On  the  Manufacture  of  Cast  Steel:  Its  Progress  and 
Employment  as  a  Substitute  for  Wrought  Iron."  British  Association  for 
the  Advancement  of  Science,  Report,  1865.  Mechanical  Science  Section, 
pp.  165-6. 


THE  PRODUCERS  349 

attendant  furnaces  and  mills,  they  not  only  hold  the 
site  of  the  old  fort  but  make  a  circle  of  glowing  for- 
tresses around  the  valley — in  Buffalo,  in  Birmingham, 
Alabama,  and  in  the  "red  crags"  of  the  Rockies  at 
Pueblo,  beneath  Pike's  Peak.  And  within  ten  years  a 
whole  new  city,1  not  far  from  Chicago,  on  Lake  Mich- 
igan, has  been  made  to  order.  A  river  was  turned 
from  its  course,  a  town  was  moved,  and  an  entirely 
new  city  was  constructed  with  homes  for  nearly  twenty 
thousand  workmen  near  a  square  mile  of  furnaces  and 
mills. 

The  attention  of  the  world  has  been  centred  upon 
the  millionaires  whom  this  mighty  trade  has  made. 
The  very  book  which  I  have  quoted  so  literally  carries 
as  its  luring  subtitle,  "The  Story  of  a  Thousand  Mil- 
lionaires." "A  huge,  exclusive  preoccupation  with 
dollar-getting,"  says  H.  G.  Wells.  But  an  occupation 
that  finds  the  red  earth  and  the  white  earth,  carries  it 
hundreds  of  miles  to  where  the  coal  is  stored  or  the 
gas  is  ready  to  be  lighted,  assembles  the  labor  from 
Europe,  and  converts  that  red  earth,  with  almost 
human  possibilities,  into  rails  and  locomotives  (that 
have  together  made  a  republic  such  as  the  United  States 
possible),  into  forty-story  buildings  and  watch-springs, 
into  bridges  and  mariners'  needles,  into  battle-ships 
and  lancets,  into  almost  every  conceivable  instrument 
of  human  use,  can  hardly  be  rightfully  called  a  pre- 
occupation with  dollar-getting,  though  it  has  brought 
the  perplexing  problem  that  has  so  much  disturbed  the 
hopes  of  democracy,  dreaming  of  such  masterful  chil- 
dren, producers,  and  poets,  yet  dreading  the  very  in- 
equalities that  their  energies  create. 

1Gary,  Indiana. 


350    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

There  comes  constantly  the  question  as  to  how  all 
this  initiative  which  has  been  so  titanic  is  to  be  recon- 
ciled with  the  general  good — a  world-wide  and  insis- 
tent problem,  which  will  be  more  serious  there  when 
the  neighborliness  is  not  so  intimate.  But  the  new 
neighborly  element  will  be  found,  we  must  believe,  as 
an  element  has  been  found  for  the  strengthening  of  steel. 

I  was  told  by  a  chemist,  when  visiting  the  mills  in 
Pittsburgh,  that  every  steelmaker  knows  that  a  little 
titanium  mixed  with  the  molten  iron  after  its  boiling 
in  air  multiplies  its  tensile  strength  immeasurably, 
though  no  one  knows  just  why  it  is  so.  Perhaps,  in 
the  plans  for  the  new  cities  of  Pittsburgh  and  Chicago, 
we  have  sign  of  the  social  titanium  that  will  increase 
the  tensile  strength  of  democracy  in  the  places  where 
the  stress  and  strain  are  greatest. 

But  my  concern  just  now  is  that  the  reader  shall 
see  how  the  valley  first  explored  by  the  French  has 
given  and  is  giving  bread  to  the  world,  and  has  post- 
poned the  dread  augury  of  the  Malthusian  doctrine; 
how  the  larger  valley  of  the  explorers  of  the  lens  and 
crucible,  Lavoisier  and  Berthelot,  is  opening  into  infin- 
ite distances;  and  how  the  under  valley,  when  breathed 
upon  by  the  air,  has  given  its  wealth  to  the  over  valley 
— and  through  this  all  to  realize  that  France's  geo- 
graphical descendants  are  out  of  those  three  valleys 
evoking,  making,  a  new  world. 

For  they  are  a  people  of  makers — of  new-age  poets, 
not  mere  workers  glorying  in  the  shafts  of  their  goads, 
wakeful  to  adorn  their  work  and  keep  clean  the  fur- 
nace, and  making  their  "craft  their  prayer"  (an  im- 
possibility in  these  days  of  the  high  division  of  labor) 
but  rough,  noisy,  grimy,  braggart  creators,  caring  not 


THE  PRODUCERS  351 

for  the  straightness  of  the  furrow  unless  it  produces 
more,  the  beauty  of  the  goad  unless  it  promotes  speed, 
the  cleanliness  of  the  furnace  unless  it  increases  the 
output,  or  the  craft  itself;  but  only  of  the  product,  the 
thing  led  forth,  and  its  value  to  the  world.  If  so  much 
is  said  of  the  dollar,  it  is  because  the  dollar  is  the  kilo- 
watt, the  measure  of  the  product.  And  while  we  have 
not  yet  found  the  ideal  way  of  distributing  what  has 
been  led  forth,  do  not  let  that  fact  obscure  the  world 
service  of  these  new-world  Prometheans,  who  have 
carried  the  fire  to  a  mortal  use  which  even  the  gods  of 
Greece  could  not  have  imagined  and  have  turned  the 
air  itself  into  fuel  to  feed  it. 

A  young  man,  born  son  of  a  stone-mason  in  that 
valley,  who  has  been  successively  a  student,  clerk, 
lawyer,  solicitor-general  of  a  great  railroad,  its  presi- 
dent, and  later  the  head  of  an  industry  that  is  carrying 
electricity  over  the  world,  said  to  me  not  long  ago 
that  he  was  building  a  trolley-line  in  Rome.  It  seemed 
a  profanation.  But  if  the  titular  function  of  the  official 
who  holds  the  highest  spiritual  office  there  was  once 
the  care  of  bridges  (Pontifex  Maximus),  will  the  higher 
utilization  of  those  bridges  not  be  some  day  made  as 
poetic,  as  spiritual,  as  high  a  function  of  state  and 
society  ? 

I  see  that  son  of  the  stone-mason,  with  blanched 
face  and  set  jaw,  facing  and  quelling  a  body  of  strikers 
threatening  to  tear  up  the  tracks  along  the  Chicago 
River,  as  brave  as  Horatius  at  the  bridge  across  the 
Tiber.  There  is  a  vivid  picture  of  democracy's  great- 
est problem  in  that  valley.  Then  I  see  him  flinging 
almost  in  a  day  a  new  bridge  across  the  Tiber.  There 
is  a  companion  picture,  a  gleam  of  democracy's  poesy. 


352     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

One  writing  of  the  habitants  of  one  of  those  smoky 
valley  cities  said:  "They  are  not  below  poetry  but 
above  it."  Rather  are  they  making  it — rough,  virile, 
formless,  rhymeless.  It  reminds  me  of  some  of  Walt 
Whitman's  verses  that  at  first  seem  but  catalogues  of 
homely  objects  on  his  horizon  but  that  by  and  by  are 
singing,  in  some  rough  rhythm,  a  song  that  stirs  one's 
blood. 

Oil  of  rocks,  led  from  cisterns  in  the  valley,  that 
Bonnecamp  found  so  dark  and  gloomy  on  the  Celoron 
journey,  to  the  lamp  of  the  academician  and  the  peas- 
ant; wheat  from  millions  of  age-long  fallow  acres  to 
keep  the  world  from  fear  of  hunger;  flour  from  the 
grinding  of  the  mills  of  the  saint  to  whom  La  Salle 
prayed;  wagons,  sewing-machines,  ploughs,  harvesters 
from  the  places  of  the  portages;  bridges,  steel  rails, 
cars,  ready-made  structures  of  twenty  stories  from  the 
places  of  the  forts;  unheard-of  fruits  from  the  trees  of 
the  new  garden  of  the  Hesperides  (under  the  magic  of 
such  as  Burbank);  flowers  from  wildernesses!  Would 
Whitman  were  come  back  to  put  all  together  into  a 
song  of  the  valley  that  should  acquaint  our  ears  with 
that  rugged  music — that  rugged  music  wakened  by  the 
plash  of  the  paddle  and  the  swirl  of  the  water  in  the 
wake  of  the  Frenchman's  canoe !  As  he  is  not,  I  can 
only  wish  that  you  who  have  read  these  chapters  may 
have  intimation  of  it,  as  not  long  ago  in  New  York, 
standing  before  a  rough,  unsightly,  entirely  isolate 
frame  in  a  university  corridor — where  there  were  heard 
normally  only  the  noises  of  closing  doors  and  shuf- 
fling feet — I  put  a  receiver  to  my  ears  and  heard,  in 
the  midst  of  these  nearer,  every-day  noises,  some  dis- 
tant cello  whose  vibrations  were  but  waiting  in  the 


THE  PRODUCERS  353 

air  to  be  heard.  Some  said  there  was  but  the  slamming 
of  doors,  but  I  had  evidence  of  my  own  ears  that  the 
music  was  there.  I  have  not  imagined  this  song  of  the 
valley,  nor  have  I  improvised  it.  Its  vibrations  which 
I  myself  feel  are  but  transmitted  as  best  an  imperfect, 
detached  frame  in  the  midst  of  other  sounds  and  in- 
terests can. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW 

THE  clearing  in  the  forest  for  the  log  schoolhouse 
where  Lincoln  got  his  only  formal  schooling  il- 
lustrates the  beginning  of  the  field  of  public 
provision  for  culture,  a  territory  then  made  up  in  that 
valley  largely  of  the  white  acres  set  apart  from  the  do- 
main of  Louis  XIV  for  the  maintenance  of  public 
schools.  I  can  tell  you  out  of  my  own  experience  how 
meagre  that  provision  was.  Out  on  the  open  prairie 
a  frame  building — the  successor  of  the  log  cabin — was 
built.  I  think  the  ground  on  which  it  stood  had  never 
been  ploughed.  I  remember  hearing,  as  if  yesterday, 
a  farmer's  boy  reciting  in  it  one  day  what  we  thought 
a  piece  of  lasting  eloquence:  "Not  many  generations 
ago  where  you  now  sit  encircled  by  all  the  embellish- 
ments of  life,  the  wild  fox  dug  his  hole  unscared  and  the 
Indian  hunter  pursued  the  panting  deer;  here  lived  and 
learned  another  race  of  beings" — little  realizing  that, 
except  in  the  encircling  embellishments,  we  were  sit- 
ting on  such  a  site,  and  that  we  were  the  "  new  race  of 
beings"  and  much  nearer  to  the  stone-age  man  than 
were  they  who  built  the  ancient  wall  just  back  of  the 
Pantheon  in  Paris. 

The  thought  of  the  nation  for  to-morrow  was  tan- 
gibly represented  only  by  that  hut  twenty  feet  square, 
with  its  few  nourishing  acres,  most  primitively  fur- 
nished, a  teacher  of  no  training  in  the  art  of  teaching, 

354 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  355 

a  few  tons  of  coal  in  a  shed,  a  box  of  crayons,  and  per- 
haps a  map.  The  master  made  his  own  fires  and 
swept  unaided,  or  with  the  aid  of  his  pupils,  the  floor. 
When,  years  later,  in  a  larger  building  on  the  same 
site  I  came  to  be  master  of  the  same  school,  and 
gathered  for  work  at  night  the  farmers'  sons  who  could 
not  leave  the  fields  by  day,  except  in  winter,  I  even 
paid  the  expense  of  the  light.  Now,  if  not  on  that 
site,  certainly  on  thousands  of  others,  in  schools  spring- 
ing from  such  beginnings,  the  community  provides  not 
only  chalk  and  electric  light,  but  pencils,  paper,  books, 
lenses,  compasses,  lathes,  libraries,  gymnastic  ap- 
paratus, pianos,  and  even  food,  if  not  free,  at  any  rate 
at  cost,  in  addition  to  trained  teachers,  trained  in  public 
normal  schools,  and  janitors,  and  automatic  ventila- 
tors to  insure  pure  air,  and  thermostats  to  preserve  an 
even  temperature.  The  public  has  become  father, 
mother,  physician,  and  guild  master  as  well  as  teacher 
of  the  new  generation. 

The  public  has  even  become  the  nurse,  for  in  most 
of  the  large  cities  the  kindergarten  has  become  trans- 
formed into  a  public  institution  which  takes  the  child 
from  the  home,  sometimes  almost  from  the  cradle, 
but  more  often  from  the  street,  at  the  age  of  four, 
five,  or  six  years,  and  keeps  it  until  it  is  ready  for  the 
tuitions  of  the  elementary  grades.  In  St.  Louis,  just 
across  and  up  the  river  from  Fort  Chartres,  where  the 
initial  municipal  experiment  was  made,  there  are  now 
more  than  two  hundred  and  eighty-three  such  schools. 

It  has,  moreover,  gone  beyond  these  serious  maternal 
employments.  The  strenuous  civilization  of  the  west 
has  insisted  that  every  man  shall  work.  But  now 
that  it  has  succeeded  in  this,  it  is  not  only  beginning 


356     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

to  insist  that  he  shall  not  work  too  much — the  maxi- 
mum hours  of  labor  in  many  employments  being  fixed 
by  law — but  he  is  being  taught  how  to  play  wisely. 
One  of  the  most  stirring  books  that  I  have  read  recently, 
"The  Spirit  of  Play  and  the  City  Streets,"  is  an  appeal 
written  by  Miss  Addams,  of  Chicago,  whose  noble 
work  has  been  for  years  among  the  people  who  live 
close  by  Marquette's  portage  hut — an  appeal  for  the 
recognition  of  the  play  instincts  and  their  conversion 
into  a  greater  permanent  human  happiness.  There  are 
statistics  which  intimate  that  the  per-hour  efficiency 
of  men  in  some  parts  of  America,  whose  number  of 
hours  of  labor  has  been  lessened,  has  also  been  dimin- 
ished— diminished  because  of  their  imprudent  use  of 
their  leisure,  of  their  play  time.  So  the  thought  of 
social  experts  is  turning  to  teaching  children  to  play 
wisely,  they  whose  ancestors  were  compelled  to  leave 
off  playing. 

I  speak  of  this  here  to  intimate  how  far  in  its  thought 
of  the  man  of  the  future,  the  nation  of  to-morrow,  that 
valley  has  travelled — first  of  all  in  its  elementary 
training,  and  within  much  less  than  a  half  century, 
from  chalk  to  grand  pianos,  and  from  inexpensive 
tuitions  in  reading,  writing,  and  arithmetic  to  the 
dearer  tuitions  in  singing,  basket-weaving,  cooking, 
sewing,  carpentering,  drawing,  and  the  trained  teach- 
ing of  the  old  elementary  subjects,  with  the  addition 
of  history,  algebra,  physiology,  Latin,  and  modern 
languages. 

When  the  State  of  Iowa  was  admitted  into  the  Union, 
in  1846,  there  were  100  log  schoolhouses  in  use,  valued 
each  at  $125.  The  latest  statistics  I  have  at  hand  show 
that  in  1912  the  average  value  of  the  13,870  school 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  357 

properties  in  the  State  was  #2,170,  that  the  average 
expenditure  for  each  pupil  was  $28.86,  and  for  each 
inhabitant  $6.58,  and  that  of  the  507,109  pupils  en- 
rolled in  the  State  only  six  per  cent  were  in  private 
schools — the  average  for  the  States  of  the  west  vary- 
ing from  less  than  one  per  cent  to  sixteen  per  cent. 

The  elementary  school  followed  the  frontier  at  even 
pace.  It  was  usually  the  first  public  building  of  every 
community,  large  or  small.  That  everybody  saw  it 
for  what  it  was,  I  cannot  maintain;  but  that  it  was  the 
symbol  of  the  nation  of  to-morrow,  borne  daily  before 
the  people  of  the  present  is  certain.  The  westerners 
carried  rails  in  the  Lincoln  campaign,  in  their  pride  of 
his  humble  birth  and  vocation;  they  carried  miniature 
log  cabins  in  another  campaign  in  exaltation  of  an- 
other frontier  hero.  They  pictured  ploughs  and  axes 
on  the  shields  of  their  commonwealths.  But  if  one 
were  to  seek  a  symbol  for  the  democracy  of  that  valley, 
one  could  find  none  more  appropriate  than  the  image 
of  a  frontier  schoolhouse.  It  is  the  most  poetical  thing 
of  all  that  western  landscape,  when  it  is  seen  for  what 
it  is,  though  it  is  not  always  architecturally  imposing. 
A  signal-box,  says  an  English  essayist,  such  as  one 
sees  along  the  railroads,  is  only  called  a  signal-box, 
but  it  is  the  house  of  life  and  death,  a  place  "where 
men  in  an  agony  of  vigilance  light  blood-red  and  sea- 
green  fires  to  keep  other  men  from  death."  A  post- 
box  is  only  called  a  post-box;  it  is  a  sanctuary  of  human 
words,  a  place  to  which  "friends  and  lovers  commit 
their  messages,  conscious  that  when  they  have  done  so 
they  are  sacred,  and  not  to  be  touched  not  only  by 
others  but  even  by  themselves."1     And  so  a  school- 

1  G.  K.  Chesterton,  on  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling,  in  his  "Heretics,"  p.  41. 


358     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

house  is  only  called  a  schoolhouse,  but  it  is  a  place 
where  the  invisible  spirits  of  the  past  meet  in  the 
present  the  nascent  spirits  of  the  future — the  meeting- 
house of  the  nation  of  yesterday  and  to-morrow.  And 
I  would  show  that  image  of  the  schoolhouse  upon  a 
field  of  white,  as  suggesting  those  white  acres  conse- 
crated of  the  domain  of  Louis  XIV  to  the  children  of 
the  west. 

Some  years  ago,  when  walking  across  the  island  of 
Porto  Rico  in  the  West  Indies,  just  after  its  occupation 
and  annexation  by  the  United  States,  I  met  in  the  in- 
terior mountains  one  morning  a  man  carrying  upon 
his  shoulders  a  basket  filled  with  flowers,  as  it  seemed 
to  me  at  a  distance.  As  he  approached,  however,  I 
saw  that  he  was  bearing  the  dead  body  of  his  child, 
with  flowers  about  it,  to  burial  in  consecrated  ground 
miles  away.  The  first  task  of  the  new  government 
there,  as  in  the  western  States,  was  to  make  fields  con- 
secrated for  the  living  child,  to  set  apart  sites  for 
schoolhouses — the  place  for  the  common  school. 

That  the  common  school  has  not  in  itself  brought 
millennial  conditions  to  the  valley  we  are  aware,  even 
as  universal  man  suffrage  has  not  brought  the  full  fruits 
of  democracy.  French  philosophers  and  American  pa- 
triots alike  have  expected  too  much  perhaps  of  an  im- 
perfect human  nature.  But  they  have  made  their  high 
demand  of  the  only  institution  that  can  give  in  full 
measure  what  is  sought  in  a  democracy. 

First,  it  teaches  the  child  the  way  and  the  means  by 
which  the  race  has  come  out  of  barbarism  and  some- 
thing of  the  rigor  of  the  disciplines  by  which  civilization 
has  been  learned. 

Second,  it  gives  this  teaching  to  the  whole  nation 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  359 

of  to-morrow.  There  are  over  ten  million  children  in 
the  public  schools  of  that  valley  alone  in  America,  and, 
as  I  stated  above,  less  than  eight  per  cent  in  the  private 
schools;  in  the  State  of  Indiana,  where  Lincoln  had  his 
slight  schooling,  less  than  three  per  cent  are  in  private 
schools — that  is,  practically  the  entire  people  of  the 
coming  generation  will  have  had  some  tuition  of  the 
common  school,  some  equality  of  fitting. 

Third,  as  is  to  be  inferred  from  the  second  fact, 
children  of  rich  and  poor,  of  banker  and  mechanic, 
doctor  and  tradesman,  come  together,  and  in  a  per- 
fectly natural  companionship,  though  in  the  great 
cities,  where  there  is  less  homogeneity,  this  mingling 
is  somewhat  disturbed  by  social  stratification  and  the 
great  masses  of  immigrants. 

So  is  the  motto  of  the  French  Republic  written  the 
length  and  breadth  of  that  valley,  though  it  may  never 
actually  be  seen  upon  a  lintel  or  door-post:  the  "lib- 
erty" of  access  to  the  knowledges  which  are  to  assist 
in  making  men  as  free  as  they  can  be;  an  elevating 
"equality"  such  as  a  State  can  give  to  men  of  un- 
equal endowments,  capacities,  and  ambitions;  and  a 
"fraternity"  which  is  unconscious  of  else  than  real 
differences. 

I  gave  intimation  in  an  earlier  chapter  of  the  cos- 
mopolitan quality  of  the  human  material  gathered 
into  those  houses  of  prophecy.  There  is  separation  of 
Caucasian  from  African  in  the  south,  and  there  is  more 
or  less  unwilling  association  of  Caucasian  and  Oriental 
in  places  of  the  far  west  on  the  Pacific  slope,  but  ex- 
cept for  these  and  for  individual  instances  where,  for 
example,  the  social  extremes  are  brought  together, 
these  minglings  are  but  microcosms  of  the  State  itself. 


360    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  schools  are  not  in  that  valley,  in  any  sense,  places 
provided  by  wealth  for  poverty,  by  one  class  for  another 
— charity  schools;  they  are  the  natural  meeting-houses 
of  democracy,  with  as  little  atmosphere  of  pauper  or 
class  schools  as  the  highways,  on  which  even  the  Presi- 
dent must  obey  the  custom  which  controls  the  humblest. 

And  let  me  say  in  passing:  there  is  no  body  of  men 
and  women  in  America  more  useful  to  the  State,  more 
high-minded,  more  patriotic,  than  the  army  of  public 
school-teachers — our  great  soldiery  of  peace. 

They  are  a  body  six  times  the  size  of  our  standing 
army — more  than  a  half-million  in  number  (547,289) 
— recruited  from  the  best  stock  we  have  and  animated 
by  higher  purposes,  more  unselfish  motives  than  any 
other  half-million  public  or  private  vocationalists  of 
America.  The  total  expenditure  for  the  common  schools 
is  but  four  and  a  half  times  the  appropriation  for  the 
standing  army,  though  the  number  of  teachers  is  six 
times  (which  intimates  how  little  we  pay  our  public 
school-teachers  relatively — seventy-eight  dollars  per 
month  to  men,  fifty-eight  dollars  to  women  teachers). 
These  men  and  women,  who  take  the  place  of  father, 
mother,  adviser,  and  nurse  in  the  new  industrial  and 
social  order — receive  about  one  and  a  quarter  cents  a 
day  per  inhabitant,  man,  woman,  and  child — a  little 
more  than  two  sous  per  day. 

It  is  this  two-sous-per-day  army  that  is  our  hope 
of  to-morrow.  It  is  primarily  upon  its  efficient  valor 
that  the  future  of  democracy  depends.  For  it  is  they, 
rather  than  the  parents,  especially  in  the  great  cities 
and  in  communities  of  large  foreign  elements,  who 
have  its  making  in  their  hands.  Without  them  the 
nation  of  to-morrow  would  be  defenseless.    She  would 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  361 

have  to  increase  her  standing  army  of  soldiers,  and  even 
then,  with  the  multitudes  of  individual  ignorances, 
malices,  selfishnesses  growing  in  her  own  valleys  and 
being  disembarked  by  millions  at  her  ports,  she  would 
be  powerless  to  defend  her  ideals. 

One  whom  I  have  already  quoted  as  speaking  so  dis- 
paragingly of  Chicago  said  that  the  most  touching 
sight  he  saw  in  America  was  the  marching  of  the 
phalanxes  of  the  nation  of  to-morrow  past  one  of  the 
generals  or  colonels  of  that  standing  army  of  teachers. 
It  was  not  in  Chicago,  but  it  might  have  been.  This 
particular  phalanx  had  not  been  in  America  long. 
They  were  singing  "Sweet  Land  of  Liberty"  as  they 
marched,  swishing  their  flags,  and  then  they  paused 
and  repeated  in  broken  speech: 

"Flag  of  our  great  republic,  inspirer  in  battle,  guard- 
ian of  our  homes,  whose  stars  and  stripes  stand  for 
bravery,  purity,  truth,  and  union,  we  salute  thee ! 
We,  the  natives  of  distant  lands  who  find  rest  under 
thy  folds,  do  pledge  our  hearts,  our  lives,  and  our 
sacred  honor  to  love  and  protect  thee,  our  country, 
and  the  liberty  of  the  American  people  forever."1  A 
little  florid,  you  may  say.  "But  think,"  said  the 
English  visitor,  even  as  he  passed  out  into  the  filthy 
street,  "think  of  the  promise  of  it !  Think  of  the  flower 
of  belief  that  may  spring  from  this  warm  sowing!" 

And  what  gives  most  promise  now  is  that  this 
tuition  has  assumed  a  more  positive  interest  in  the 
nation  of  to-morrow.  The  pioneer  school  was  a  place 
of  discipline,  a  place  of  fraternity,  and  it  had  the  co- 
operation of  the  home  discipline  and  of  the  discipline 
of  the  primitive  industrial  life  in  which  the  boy  joined 

1  H.  G.  Wells,  "Future  in  America,"  p.  205. 


362     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

even  during  his  school  years.  But  that  tuition  was  in 
a  sense  as  unsocialized  as  was  the  democracy  of  that 
day.  It  was  assumed  that  this  meagre  training  would 
equip  the  boy  with  all  the  tools  of  citizenship.  Being 
able  to  read,  write,  and  cipher,  his  own  instincts  and 
interests  would  somehow  procure  good  government  and 
happiness.  Whatever  patriotic  stimulus  his  school 
gave  him,  as  I  recall  out  of  my  experience,  was  through 
a  history  which  engendered  a  feeling  of  hostility  toward 
England.  That  is  being  succeeded  by  a  positive  pro- 
gramme that  thinks  very  definitely  of  the  boy's  fullest 
development  and  of  his  social  spiritualization.  The 
schoolhouse  has  become,  or  is  in  the  way  of  becoming, 
the  civic  centre  of  the  nation. 

But  on  top  of  the  eight  years'  training  of  the  ele- 
mentary school,  which  was  considered  at  first  the  full 
measure  of  the  obligation  of  the  community,  the  State 
in  that  region  came  to  build  additional  years  of  dis- 
cipline— the  high  schools,  first  to  equip  young  men  for 
colleges  or  universities  and  then  to  fit  them  for  the 
meeting  of  the  more  highly  complex  and  specialized 
problems  of  life.  These  schools  multiplied  in  the  upper 
Mississippi  Valley  at  an  extraordinary  rate  after  the 
elementary  schools  had  prepared  the  way.  In  the 
northern  part  of  that  valley  alone  sixteen  hundred  were 
established  between  i860  and  1902.  And  there  is 
hardly  a  community  of  five  thousand  inhabitants  that 
has  not  its  fully  organized  and  well-equipped  high  or 
secondary  school;  while  even  towns  of  a  thousand  in- 
habitants or  less  have  made  such  provision. 

Near  the  site  of  the  village  of  the  Illinois  Indians, 
the  village  where  Pere  Marquette  went  from  hut  to 
hut   in    his  ministries  just  before  his  death  journey; 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  363 

where  La  Salle  gathered  about  his  rock-built  castle 
his  red  allies  to  the  number  of  thousands  and  attempted 
to  build  up  what  La  Barre,  in  his  letter  to  Louis  XIV, 
characterized  as  an  imaginary  kingdom  for  himself — 
there  is  a  beautiful  river  city,  bearing  the  Indian  name 
of  "Ottawa,"  and  in  the  midst  of  it  a  large  building 
that  was  for  me  the  capital  of  an  imaginary  kingdom, 
my  one-time  world,  though  it  is  called  a  township 
high  school.  I  speak  of  it  because  it  is  typical  of  the 
instruction  and  influence  that  have  come  out  of  the 
long  past,  and  that  are  looking  into  the  long  future, 
in  thousands  of  the  towns  and  cities  that  have  each 
about  them  as  many  aspiring  men,  women,  and  youth 
as  La  Salle  had  savage  souls  about  his  solitary  castle  in 
the  wilderness. 

These  are  the  new  Rocks  St.  Louis,  these  the  eagles' 
nests  of  the  new  Nouvelle  France — I  have  visited 
scores  of  them — at  Peoria,  that  was  Fort  Crevecceur; 
at  Joliet,  where  is  now  one  of  the  best-equipped  schools 
in  the  valley;  at  Marquette,  upon  Lake  Superior;  at 
Chicago,  where  I  spoke  one  day  to  four  thousand 
high-school  boys  and  girls,  for  in  most  of  these 
schools  the  boys  and  girls  are  taught  together.  The 
valley  has  one  of  these  schools  every  few  miles,  where 
are  gathered  for  the  higher,  sterner  disciplines  of  de- 
mocracy those  who  wish  to  prepare  themselves  for  its 
larger  service. 

Their  courses  are  four  years  in  length,  and,  though 
varying  widely,  have  each  a  core  of  mathematics,  Eng- 
lish, foreign  languages,  and  either  science  or  manual 
training  or  commerce.  In  some  large  cities  the  schools 
are  differentiated  as  general,  manual  training,  and  com- 
mercial. 


364    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

But  the  States  of  that  valley  have  not  stopped  here. 
With  the  encouragement  of  national  grants — again 
from  the  great  domain  of  Louis  XIV — they  have  estab- 
lished universities  with  colleges  of  liberal  arts  and 
sciences,  and  schools  of  agriculture,  forestry,  mining, 
engineering,  pharmacy,  veterinary  surgery,  commerce, 
law,  medicine,  and  philosophy.  There  is  not  a  State 
in  all  that  valley  that  has  not  its  university  in  name 
and  in  most  instances  in  fact.  They  admit  both  men 
and  women  and  there  is  no  fee,  or  only  a  nominal  fee, 
to  residents  of  the  State.  These  are  the  great  strategic 
centres  and  strongholds  of  the  new  democracy. 

A  little  way  back  from  Cadillac's  fort  on  the  Detroit 
River  is  one,  the  oldest,  the  University  of  Michigan — 
founded  in  1837 — with  5,805  students.  A  few  years 
ago  I  addressed  there,  at  commencement,  over  eight 
hundred  candidates  for  degrees  and  diplomas  in  law, 
medicine,  pharmacy,  liberal  arts  and  science. 

A  little  way  from  the  Fox-Wisconsin  portage  is  an- 
other, the  University  of  Wisconsin,  with  5,970  students. 
A  few  years  ago  I  sat  in  that  beautiful  seat  of  learning 
among  men  from  all  parts  of  the  world  offering  their 
congratulations  at  its  jubilee.  And  they  sat  in  silk 
gowns  only  less  ornate  than  Nicolet's  when  he  came 
over  the  rim  of  the  basin  to  treat  with  the  Winne- 
bagoes — whom  he  had  supposed  to  be  Chinese  man- 
darins. I  heard,  too,  the  graduates  receive  their  degrees 
on  theses  ranging  from  the  poetry  of  a  lesser  Greek 
poet  to  the  "pancreas  of  a  cat."  I  spent  a  month  in 
its  library  at  a  later  time  and  found  it  superior  for  my 
purposes  to  any  other  in  America. 

No  higher  institution  of  learning  in  America  is  more 
strongly   possessed   by   the   spirit  of  the   ministry  of 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  365 

scholarship  directly  to  the  people.  It  needs  sorely  ad- 
vice of  the  arts  that  centre  in  Paris,  as  most  of  those 
universities  do.  It  needs  advice  not  of  industry  but 
of  the  indefatigable  disinterestedness  of  the  French. 

Behind  the  Falls  of  St.  Anthony  in  the  Mississippi 
River,  first  described  and  named  by  Father  Hennepin,  is 
the  University  of  Minnesota,  with  6,642  students.  The 
principal  deity  of  the  Sioux  was  supposed  to  live  under 
these  falls,  and  Hennepin,  the  priest  of  Artois,  speaks 
in  his  journal  of  hearing  one  of  the  Indians  at  the 
portage  around  the  falls,  in  loud  and  lamenting  voice 
haranguing  the  spirit  to  whom  he  had  just  hung  a  robe 
of  beaver-skin  among  the  branches  of  a  tree.  The 
buildings  that  are  and  are  planned  to  be  on  this  site 
would  tell  better  than  a  chapter  of  description  what 
a  single  State  has  done  and  is  purposing  at  this 
portage  of  St.  Anthony  of  Padua,  where  hardly  more 
than  a  lifetime  ago  the  savage  was  sacrificing  beaver- 
skins  to  the  god  of  the  Mississippi.  There  are  many 
great  laboratories  and  academic  buildings  upon  that 
high  shore  at  present,  but  a  score  more  are  in  prospect 
for  this  mighty  democratic  university  of  letters  and 
science,  law  and  medicine,  that  will  house  in  other 
centuries  perhaps  not  merely  the  appeased  spirit  of 
the  Mississippi  but  such  learning  as  is  in  Paris  or  was 
in  Padua,  whose  saint  is  still  remembered  by  the  falls; 
for  the  university  has  the  necessary  means.  When 
the  Eglise  of  the  Sorbonne,  which  Richelieu  had  con- 
secrated, was  being  built,  the  French  priests  out  along 
the  shores  of  Superior  were  preparing  the  way  for 
this  new-world  university.  Certain  lands  in  that  iron 
region  which  they  first  explored  were  given  by  the 
nation   as   dowry  to  the  university.    These  were  not 


366     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

thought  to  be  valuable,  as  at  the  time  of  the  grant  the 
most  valuable  timber  and  farming  land  had  been  sold. 
Fifteen  years  ago,  more  or  less,  a  train-load  of  iron  ore 
was  brought  down  from  that  region  to  Allouez,  a  town 
on  the  lake  named  in  memory  of  the  priest  of  St. 
Esprit — and  now  the  lands  of  the  university  are  valued 
at  from  thirty  to  fifty  millions  of  dollars.1 

One  might  follow  the  River  Colbert  all  the  way  down 
the  valley  and  trace  its  branches  to  the  mountains  on 
either  side,  and  find  in  every  State  some  such  fortress: 
in  Iowa  a  university  with  2,255  students;  in  Illinois 
one  with  4,330;  and  so  on  to  the  banks  of  the  river  in 
Texas  where  La  Salle  died — and  there  learn  that  the 
most  extensive  of  all  in  its  equipment  may  some  day 
rise.  These,  besides  the  scores  of  institutions  of  private 
foundation,  but  compelled  to  the  same  public  spirit 
as  the  State  universities,  tell  with  what  thought  of 
to-morrow  the  geographical  descendants  of  France  are 
doing  their  tasks  of  to-day,  where  Allouez  and  Mar- 
quette, Hennepin  and  Du  Lhut,  Radisson  and  Groseil- 
liers,  and  the  Sieur  de  la  Salle  wandered  and  suffered 
and  died  but  yesterday. 

Their  paths  have  opened  and  multiplied  not  only 
into  streets  of  cities  and  highways  and  railroads  but 
into  curricula  of  the  world's  wisdoms,  gathered  from 
Paris  and  Oxford  and  Edinburgh  and  Berlin  and 
Bologna  and  Prague  and  Salamanca,  even  as  their 
students  are  being  gathered  from  all  peoples.  Perrot 
spoke  truer  than  he  knew  when  he  said  to  the  savages 
of  Wisconsin,  "I  am  but  the  dawn  of  the  day";  and 
the  Indian  chief  who  first  of  human  beings  welcomed 
Europeans   the   other   side   of  the   Mississippi    River 

1  "Forty  Years  at  the  University  of  Minnesota,"  p.  243. 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  367 

spoke  in  prophecy  when  he  said  that  the  earth  had 
grown  more  beautiful  with  their  coming. 

The  common  school,  the  high  school,  the  college  and 
university — the  common  school  compulsory  for  every 
child;  the  high  school  open  to  every  boy  and  girl,  with- 
out regard  to  race,  creed,  or  riches;  the  university 
accessible  to  every  young  man  and  woman  who  has 
the  ambition,  the  endurance,  to  make  his  way  or  her 
way  to  the  frontiers  of  the  spirit  and  endure  their 
hardships !  For  I  think  of  these  universities  as  the 
free  lands  that  were  out  upon  the  borders  of  that 
valley,  except  that  this  frontier  of  the  mind  will  never, 
never  find  its  limit.  There  will  always  be  a  frontier 
beyond,  for  new  settlers,  new  squatters,  of  the  telescope 
which  makes  the  universe  smaller,  of  the  microscope 
which  enlarges  it,  of  the  written  word,  the  spoken  word, 
the  unknown  quantities,  the  philosophies  of  life.  Do 
we  not  see  the  illimitable  fields  opening  even  beyond 
the  vision  of  those  men  of  the  crucible  and  retort,  who 
are  but  leading  the  new  farmers  on  to  visible  fields  of 
increasing  richness  ? 

Hardly  less  cosmopolitan  are  the  men  of  science  and 
letters  who  are  actually  in  those  regions,  and  only  less 
so  those  tens  of  thousands,  who,  like  migrants  of  the 
earlier  days,  are  going  forward,  many  to  the  farthest, 
lonesomest  frontiers  of  knowledge,  but  all  to  something 
beyond  their  immediate  ancestral  lot  or  field. 

I  am  not  thinking  of  the  additions  to  the  world's 
learning  in  all  this,  great  as  it  is  but  impossible  of  ap- 
praisement. Nor  am  I  thinking  chiefly  of  the  indus- 
trial and  material  advantages.  I  think  it  was  some 
bacteriological  discovery,  known  as  the  Babcock  test, 
resulting  in  a  great  improvement  in  the  making  of 


368     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

butter,  that  gave  the  University  of  Wisconsin  its  first 
wide  sympathetic  support.  It  was  the  discovery  by 
a  professor  in  one  of  the  western  universities  of  the 
means  of  inoculating  with  some  fatal  disease,  and  so 
exterminating,  an  insect  that  destroyed  wheat  and 
oats,  which  gave  that  professor  a  chancellorship,  I  am 
told,  and  his  university  more  liberal  appropriations. 
But  those  achievements  and  fames,  while  not  to  be 
belittled,  I  have  no  wish  to  catalogue  and  recite  here. 
I  am  thinking  of  the  social  value  of  this  great  public 
educational  system  that  is  thinking  constantly  of  to- 
morrow— of  the  world  markets  of  to-morrow,  to  some 
extent,  to  which  these  curricula,  as  railroads'  and  ships' 
courses,  lead;  of  the  world's  letters  of  to-morrow,  per- 
haps; but  more  specifically  and  more  especially  of  the 
higher  happiness  of  those  particular  regions  and  the 
success  of  its  democracy.  I  am  thinking  of  what  these 
institutions  of  the  people's  own  devising  are  doing 
toward  the  making  of  a  homogeneous  spirit,  in  which 
individual,  disinterested,  and  varied  achievement  will 
have  a  liberty  to  grow — as  perhaps  in  no  other  soil  of 
earth. 

Democritus  said  two  thousand  years  and  more  ago: 
"Education  and  nature  are  similar.  For  education 
transforms  the  man,  and  in  transforming  him  creates 
in  him  a  new  nature."  The  State  in  its  three  institu- 
tions— the  common  school,  the  high  school,  the  college 
and  university — has  many  in  its  care  and  under  its 
tuitions  for  fifteen,  sixteen,  seventeen  years,  and  in 
these  tuitions  has  she  created  in  her  children  a  new 
nature,  whatever  their  ancestry  or  place  of  birth. 
Memories  of  Europe's  forges  and  trees,  or  fields  of 
roses  and  golden  mountains,  and  even  of  Asia's  wil- 


THE  THOUGHT  OF  TO-MORROW  369 

dernesses,  are  in  the  names  of  many  who  enter  those 
doors;  the  memories  of  other  languages  are  in  the  mus- 
cles of  their  tongues  or  the  formation  of  their  organs 
of  speech.  Like  the  ancient  Ephraimites  at  the  fords 
of  Jordan,  they  cannot  "frame  to  pronounce"  certain 
words.  And  memories  of  persecution  or  of  vassalage 
are  in  the  physical  and  mental  attitudes  of  some.  But 
they  are  all  reborn  of  a  genealogy  impersonal  but 
loftier  in  its  gifts  than  any  mere  personal  heritage — a 
genealogy  which,  like  that  of  the  children  of  Deucalion, 
begins  in  the  earth  itself,  the  free  soil. 

I  have  often  thought  and  spoken  of  how  artificial 
differences  disappear  when,  let  us  say,  Smith  (English) 
and  Schmidt  (German)  and  Cohen  (Hebrew),  Coletti 
(Italian)  and  D'Artagnan  (French)  and  McGregor 
(Scotch)  and  Olsen  (Scandinavian)  and  McCarthy 
(Irish)  and  Winslow  (of  old  America)  travel  together 
through  the  parasangs  of  the  "Anabasis,"  or  together 
follow  Caesar  into  Gaul,  or  together  compute  a  solar 
parallax,  or  build  an  arch,  or  do  any  one  of  a  thousand 
things  that  have  no  national  boundaries  or  racial  char- 
acteristics. This  is  an  extreme  but  not  an  unheard-of 
assembling  of  elements  which  the  State  has  the  task  of 
assimilating  to  its  own  ideals. 

I  have  not  spoken,  I  cannot  speak,  of  methods  of 
that  teaching,  of  its  shortcomings,  of  it  crudities  in 
many  places,  of  its  general  want  of  appreciation  of 
form  and  color  (of  its  particular  need  of  France  there), 
of  its  utilitarian  inclinations,  and  of  its  eager  haste. 
The  essential  thing  that  I  have  wanted  to  say  is  that 
this  valley  is  not  only  more  democratic  socially  and 
politically  than  any  other  part  of  America,  unless  it 
be  that  narrow  strip  farther  west,  but    is  also   more 


37o    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

consciously  and  vitally  and  constantly  concerned  about 
the  nation  of  to-morrow. 

I  spoke  of  the  flaming  ingot  of  steel  swinging  in 
the  smoky  ravine  by  the  site  of  Fort  Duquesne  as  the 
symbol  of  the  new  human  metal  that  is  made  of  the 
mingling  of  men  of  varied  race,  tradition,  and  ideals  in 
the  labor  of  that  continent.  But  above  that  in  a 
clearer  sky  shines  a  more  hopeful  symbol — the  house 
of  the  school,  the  meeting-place  of  the  invisible  spirits, 
the  place  of  prophecy,  pictured  against  a  white  field. 

The  historians  have  traced  the  origins  of  these  in- 
stitutions to  New  England,  to  England,  to  Germany, 
to  Greece.  It  is  not  remembered  that  France  went 
first  and  hallowed  the  fields.  But  it  is  my  hope  that 
out  in  that  valley,  once  a  year,  school  and  university 
may  be  led  to  look  back  to  the  men  who  there  ven- 
tured all  for  the  "greater  glory  of  God"  and  majesty 
of  France  and  found  a  field  for  the  greater  freedom 
and  fraternity  of  mankind. 

My  own  thought  goes  back  to  the  place  by  the  St. 
Charles  River  where  Cartier's  boat,  which  he  could 
not  take  back  to  St.  Malo  because  so  many  of  his  men 
had  died,  was  left  to  be  buried  by  the  river,  the  place 
where  Montcalm  gathered  his  shattered  army  after 
the  defeat  on  the  Plains  of  Abraham.  It  was  there 
that  a  structure  once  stood,  made  of  planks  hewn  out 
of  the  forest,  plastered  with  mud  and  thatched  with 
long  grass  from  the  meadows.  It  was  the  residence  of 
Notre  Dame  des  Anges,  the  house  from  which  the  first 
martyrs  were  to  go  forth  toward  the  west.  This  was, 
says  Parkman,  the  cradle  of  the  great  mission  of  New 
France.  And  to  this  my  thought  goes  as  the  precursor 
of  the  university  in  the  Valley  of  the  New  Democracy. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 
"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS" 

IF  one  travels  along  the  lower  St.  Lawrence  in  sum- 
mer, one  sees  the  narrow  strips  of  the  one-time 
great  seigniories,  clinging  like  ribbons  of  varied 
colors,  green,  gold,  and  brown,  to  the  ancient  river,  of 
Cartier  and  Champlain.  There  is  on  each  strip,  a 
little  way  back  from  the  river,  a  picturesque  cottage, 
usually  thatched,  not  roofed  by  shingles,  with  its  out- 
buildings close  about,  such  as  Longfellow  writes  of  in 
Acadia — memories  of  homes  "which  the  peasants  of 
Normandy  built  in  the  reign  of  the  Henries."  There 
is  usually  on  each  a  section  of  meadow  for  the  cattle, 
a  section  of  tilled  field  for  the  wheat  and  corn  and 
vegetables  and  a  section  of  woodland  for  the  fire-wood 
— each  strip,  so  divided,  being  a  complete  miniature 
seigniory.  Everything  is  neat.  One  feels  that  not  a 
wisp  of  hay  is  lost  (for  it  was  in  haying  time  that  I 
passed),  that  every  tree  is  as  carefully  watched  as  a 
child,  that  whatever  is  taken  from  the  fields  they  are 
not  impoverished.  The  living  owners,  when  they  go 
to  their  graves,  leave  their  little  patches  of  earth  as 
rich  as  they  found  them.  There  is  no  hurrying.  The 
habitants  go  at  the  pace  of  their  oxen.  They  are 
thrifty,  apparently  contented,  conservers  of  what  they 
have;  they  spend  prudently  for  to-day;  they  save  for 
to-morrow — not  for  the  to-morrow  of  the  nation,  but 
for  the  to-morrow  of  the  family.    They  are  avowedly 

371 


372     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

individualistic,  nepotic   conservationists    and   only  in 
effect  national. 

This  is  one  picture.  I  put  beside  it  another.  Out 
on  the  farther  edge  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  one  finds 
the  other  extreme.  Within  the  past  twenty-two  years 
certain  tracts  of  vacant  land  have  been  purchased  by 
the  government  from  the  Indians  (and  let  me  here 
say  that  the  government  has  been  trying  to  deal 
fairly  with  these  people;  mistakes  have  been  made, 
but  I  should  say  that  the  nation  had  in  its  recent 
treatment  of  them,  despite  reports  I  have  heard  in 
Paris,  pauperized  rather  than  robbed  them).  These 
tracts  have  been  opened  to  settlement — all  the  rest  of 
the  great  public  domain  that  was  immediately  desir- 
able having  been  occupied,  as  we  have  seen.  When, 
in  1889,  the  first  of  these  tracts,  nearly  two  million 
acres,  was  to  be  opened,  twenty  thousand  people  were 
waiting  just  outside  its  borders — some  on  swift  horses, 
some  in  wagons  or  buggies,  and  some  in  railroad  trains. 
When  the  signal  was  given  there  was  a  race  across  the 
border  and  a  scramble  for  farm  sites;  and  on  the  part 
of  the  passengers  on  the  trains,  for  town  lots,  when 
the  trains  had  reached  the  predetermined  sites  of  cities. 
At  the  close  of  the  first  day  the  future  capital  of  what 
has  for  many  years  been  a  State  had  a  population  of 
several  thousand  inhabitants  living  in  tents,  and  within 
a  hundred  days  a  population  of  fifteen  thousand  people, 
mostly  men,  an  electric  system  in  operation,  a  street- 
railway  under  contract,  streets,  alleys,  parks,  boule- 
vards, stores,  and  bridges,  four  thousand  houses  under 
construction,  five  banks,  fifteen  hotels,  fifty  grocery 
stores,  six  printing-offices,  and  three  daily  papers — 
about  as  striking  and   unpleasant  a  contrast  to  that 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  373 

peaceful  life  on  the  St.  Lawrence  as  one  can  well 
imagine.  Practically  all  of  the  available  land  (nearly 
two  million  acres)  was  taken  during  the  course  of  a 
few  days. 

At  the  later  opening  of  another  tract  one  hundred 
thousand  persons  took  part  in  the  race  for  the  "last 
of  the  people's  land."  And  these  scenes  but  illustrate 
the  rough  races  to  the  gold-fields  and  the  iron  moun- 
tains and  the  oil-wells,  in  eagerness  to  seize  whatever 
earth  had  to  offer  and  turn  it  to  immediate  wealth — 
rough,  restless  precursors,  producers,  poets  eager  for 
to-day,  yet  coming  by  and  by,  as  we  have  seen,  to  be 
ready  to  spend  for  to-morrow,  building  schools  and 
universities,  enlarging  the  field  of  public  provision  and 
service,  and  filling  the  land,  once  neighborly,  individ- 
ualistic, with  institutions  of  philanthropy. 

But  the  habitant  of  that  farther  valley  is  consider- 
ate neither  of  himself  nor  of  generous  nature.  He  is 
ready  to  spend  his  all,  or  her  all,  of  to-day  for  to-day 
and  for  to-morrow,  and  to  some  extent  unselfishly,  but 
not  to  save  it.  He  lives  "angerously"  and  takes  all 
the  risks.  His  thought  of  the  future  is  not  nepotic  or 
thrifty;  it  is  likely  to  be  altruistic,  publicistic.  I  sup- 
pose that  the  constitution  and  laws  of  Oklahoma, 
whose  land  was  the  last  to  be  added  to  the  public  do- 
main and  its  commonwealth  among  the  last  to  the 
roll  of  States,  has  been  more  generous-minded  toward 
its  children  than  any  other.  It  set  apart  not  only 
sections  sixteen  and  thirty-six  in  every  township  for 
the  public  schools;  it  reserved  two  more  sections  in 
every  township  for  kindred  uses.  But  in  all  this,  as  I 
pointed  out,  it  is  spending  for  the  future,  not  saving, 
hoarding. 


374     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  nepotic  conservationist  of  the  St.  Lawrence, 
fixed  in  his  place,  saves  because  if  he  leaves  but  an 
exhausted  field  behind  him  he  is  robbing  his  children 
and  grandchildren  of  their  rightful,  personal  heritage. 
The  "boomer"  of  Oklahoma  exploits  and  spends  lav- 
ishly because  of  a  sublime  confidence  in  the  illimitabil- 
ity  of  the  resources  of  nature  and  in  the  resourceful- 
ness of  the  coming  generations. 

But  the  natural  scientists — the  foresters,  the  physiog- 
raphers, the  geologists — have  within  a  very  few  years 
been  making  themselves  heard  in  warning.  They  have 
said  that  "the  mountains  of  France,  of  Spain,  and  China 
have  been  denuded  of  their  forests  in  large  measure  so 
that  the  supply  of  wood  is  inadequate  to  meet  the  needs 
of  the  people,"1  that  "in  Spain  and  Italy,  though 
warm  countries,  the  people  suffer  more  from  the  cold 
than  in  America  because  of  insufficient  fuel,"2  that 
"one-half  of  the  people  of  the  world  go  to  bed  hun- 
gry,"3 or  at  any  rate  insufficiently  nourished  for  the 
next  day's  work.  But  few  listened  to  them  except  in 
the  hills  and  in  the  valleys  of  abandoned  farms.  France, 
Italy,  Spain,  China  were  remote.  The  optimism 
fostered  of  new  teeming  acres  and  newly  discovered 
mines  was  heedless  of  the  warning.  It  tore  down 
barns  and  built  bigger,  and  it  gave  even  more  gener- 
ously to  the  need  of  the  hour  and  the  day. 

But  the  scientists  came  even  nearer  home  in  their 
studies  and  statistics.  These  are  some  of  the  ominous 
and  disturbing  facts  that  are  getting  to  the  ears  of  the 
people  out  of  their  laboratories  and  experiment  stations: 

1  C.  R.  Van  Hise,  "Conservation  of  Natural  Resources  in  the  United 
States,"  p.  3. 

2  Van  Hise,  p.  2.  »  Van  Hise,  p.  3. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  375 

The  coal-fields  of  the  United  States  (which  lie  al- 
most exclusively  in  and  upon  the  eastern  and  western 
edges  of  the  Mississippi  Valley)  were,  at  the  rate  at 
which  coal  was  used  a  few  decades  ago,  practically 
inexhaustible.  But  the  per-capita  consumption  has 
increased  from  about  a  ton  in  1870  to  5.6  tons  in 
1907.1  Up  to  1908,  7,240,ooo,ooo2  tons  had  been 
mined,  but  over  ten  million  tons  were  wasted  in  the 
mining  of  seven  billions.  You  may  recall  the  prophecy 
which  I  quoted  earlier,  that  if  the  mining  and  wasting 
go  on  at  the  same  rate  of  increase  as  in  the  past  few 
decades  the  supposed  illimitable  fields  will  be  ex- 
hausted in  one  hundred  and  fifty  years — that  is  by  the 
year  2050.3  This  is  one  of  the  statistics  of  those 
watchmen  on  the  walls  who,  instead  of  standing  in 
high  places  with  telescopes,  sit  at  microscopes  or  over 
tables  of  figures.  That  seems  a  long  period  of  time, 
one  hundred  and  fifty  years,  but  it  was  only  a  little 
longer  ago  that  a  French  explorer  saw  the  first  signs 
of  coal  in  that  valley  along  the  Illinois,  and,  as  the 
scientist  has  intimated,  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should 
not  expect  a  future  of  thousands  of  years  for  the  coal 
that  has  been  thousands  or  millions  of  years  in  the 
making. 

The  petroleum  and  natural-gas  fields  are  also  nearly 
all  in  that  valley  or  on  its  edges.  (I  think  it  was  in 
the  narrow  valley  of  La  Belle  Riviere,  which  Pere 
Bonnecamp  found  so  dark  on  that  Celoron  expedition, 
that  this  oil  of  the  rocks  was  first  found.)4     If  we  as- 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  23.  a  Van  Hise,  p.  25.  3  Van  Hise,  p.  25. 

4  Natural  gas  and  burning  springs  were  early  known  to  the  French 
pioneers  and  Jesuits  who  penetrated  the  Iroquois  country,  as  the  following 
extracts  show: 

"It  was  during  this  interval  that,  in  order  to  pass  away  the  time,  I  went 


376    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

sume  that  the  fields  have  all  been  discovered  and  that 
the  present  rate  of  exploitation  is  to  continue,  the  sup- 
ply of  petroleum  will  be  exhausted  by  1935  (twenty- 
one  years),  or,  if  the  present  production  goes  on  with- 
out increase,  in  ninety  years  (i.  e.,  eighty-six  years),1 
and  that  of  natural  gas  in  twenty-five  years  (i.  e., 
twenty-one  years  from  1914).2 

Iron,  the  metal  which  the  Indians  worshipped  as 
a  spirit  when  they  first  saw  it  in  the  hands  of  the 
French,  a  substance  so  precious  that  their  name  for 
it  meant  "all  kinds  of  good,"  has,  too,  been  taken 
with  feverish  haste  from  its  ancient  places.    Joliet  and 

with  M.  de  LaSalle,  under  the  escort  of  two  Indians,  about  four  leagues 
south  of  the  village  where  we  were  staying,  to  see  a  very  extraordinary 
spring.  Issuing  from  a  moderately  high  rock,  it  forms  a  small  brook. 
The  water  is  very  clear  but  has  a  bad  odor,  like  that  of  the  mineral  marshes 
of  Paris,  when  the  mud  on  the  bottom  is  stirred  with  the  foot.  I  applied  a 
torch  and  the  water  immediately  took  fire  and  burned  like  brandy,  and  was 
not  extinguished  until  it  rained.  This  flame  is  among  the  Indians  a  sign  of 
abundance  or  sterility  according  as  it  exhibits  the  contrary  qualities.  There 
is  no  appearance  of  sulphur,  saltpetre  or  any  other  combustible  material. 
The  water  has  not  even  any  taste,  and  I  can  neither  offer  nor  imagine  any 
better  explanation,  than  that  it  acquires  this  combustible  property  by  pass- 
ing over  some  aluminous  land."— Galinee's  journal,  1669,  in  "Marshall 
Historical  Writings,"  p.  209. 

"...  The  spring  in  the  direction  of  Sonnontouan  is  no  less  wonderful; 
for  its  water — being  of  the  same  nature  as  the  surrounding  soil,  which  has 
only  to  be  washed  in  order  to  obtain  perfectly  pure  sulphur — ignites  when 
shaken  violently,  and  yields  sulphur  when  boiled.  As  one  approaches 
nearer  to  the  country  of  the  Cats,  one  finds  heavy  and  thick  water,  which 
ignites  like  brandy,  and  boils  up  in  bubbles  of  flame  when  fire  is  applied  to 
it.  It  is,  moreover,  so  oily,  that  all  our  Savages  use  it  to  anoint  and  grease 
their  heads  and  their  bodies." — "Jesuit  Relations,  1657,"  43  :  261. 

Pierre  Boucher  (governor  of  Three  Rivers  in  1653-8  and  1662-7)  thus 
mentions  the  mineral  products  of  Canada,  in  his  "Histoire  veritable  et 
naturelle  de  la  Nouvelle  France"  (Paris,  1664),  chap.  I:  "Springs  of  salt 
water  have  been  discovered,  from  which  excellent  salt  can  be  obtained;  and 
there  are  others,  which  yield  minerals.  There  is  one  in  the  Iroquois  Country, 
which  produces  a  thick  liquid,  resembling  oil,  and  which  is  used  in  place 
of  oil  for  many  purposes." — "Jesuit  Relations,"  8  :  289. 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  48  2  Van  Hise,  p.  56. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  377 

Marquette  saw  deposits  of  this  ore  near  the  mouth  of 
the  Ohio  in  1673,  but  it  was  a  century  and  a  half 
before  the  harvesting  of  this  crop,  down  among  the 
rocks  for  millions  of  years  before,  began.  And  now,  if 
no  new  fields  are  found  and  the  increased  use  goes  on 
at  the  rate  of  the  last  three  decades,  all  the  available 
high-grade  ore  will  have  become  pig  iron  and  steel 
billets,  bridges,  battle-ships,  sky-scrapers,  and  loco- 
motives, and  all  kinds  of  goods,  within  the  next  three 
decades.1 

The  forests  of  the  United  States — the  forests  pri- 
meval, with  the  voice  of  whose  murmuring  pines  and 
hemlocks  Longfellow  begins  his  sad  story  of  the  Aca- 
dians — contained  approximately  one  billion  acres,2  a 
region  not  conterminous  with,  but  almost  as  large  as, 
the  Mississippi  Valley.  Of  that  great,  tempering,  be- 
nign shadow  over  the  continent,  tempering  its  heat, 
giving  shelter  from  its  cold,  restraining  the  waters, 
there  is  left  about  65  per  cent  in  acreage  and  not 
more  than  one-half  the  merchantable  timber — five 
hundred  million  acres  gone  in  a  century  and  a  half.3 

And  as  to  the  land  itself — the  land  first  symbolized 
in  the  tuft  of  earth  that  St.  Lusson  lifted  toward  the 
sky  that  day  in  1671  at  Sault  Ste.  Marie,  when  he  took 
possession  of  all  the  land  between  the  seas  of  the  north 
and  west  and  south — in  the  first  place,  the  loss  each 
year  from  erosion  is  six  hundred  and  ten  million  cubic 
yards.4  This  is,  of  course,  inconsiderable  in  a  short 
period  but  in  a  long  period  of  years  means  a  mighty 
loss  of  nourishing  soil.    With  this  loss  is  that  of  nitro- 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  68.  2  Van  Hise,  p.  210.  3  Van  Hise,  p.  210. 

*Van  Hise,  p.  307,  quoted  from  W.  J.  Spillman,  "Report  National  Con- 
servation Commission,"  3  :  257-262. 


378     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

gen,  potassium,  and  phosphorus,  things  of  which  the 
farmer  had  not  even  heard  the  names  a  few  years  ago. 
The  yield  of  farms  in  the  United  States  during  the 
last  forty  years  does  not  show  a  decreased  average, 
but  it  must  be  remembered  that  in  this  period  there 
have  been  brought  under  cultivation  new  and  virgin 
acres,  which  have  in  their  bountiful  yield  kept  up  the 
general  average.  One  authority  says  that,  taking  the 
country  by  regions  and  by  districts  and  considering 
what  has  actually  happened,  he  is  led  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  fertility  of  the  soil  for  50  per  cent  of  our  coun- 
try has  been  lessened.1 

The  significance  of  these  facts  lies  in  the  desire  of 
the  people  to  know  the  truth  and  seek  a  remedy. 

In  a  sense  the  public  domain  has  been  exhausted. 
The  pick  of  the  land  has  been  pre-empted,  occupied. 
But  if  it  is  to  grow  with  all  its  crops,  and  to  put  forth 
with  all  its  products  such  a  public  spirit  as  this,  France 
will  have  given  to  America  a  treasure  infinitely  more 
valuable  than  the  land  itself  which  her  explorers  gave 
to  Europe  and  the  world. 

The  beaver,  which  the  French  regarded  as  the  first 
opulence  of  the  valley,  remains  only  as  a  synonym  for 
industry,  one  of  the  States  being  called  the  "Beaver 
State,"  perhaps  in  memory  of  the  beaver  days  but 
now  in  characterization  of  the  beaverlike  activity  of 
its  people.  The  hide  of  the  buffalo  which  La  Salle 
showed  in  Paris  is  now  almost  as  great  a  curiosity  in 
the  valley  as  it  was  in  Paris  in  1680.  Wild  beasts  now 
slink  only  in  the  mountains'  margins.  Domestic  ani- 
mals, natives  of  distant  lands,  live  about  the  dwellings 
of  men. 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  299. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  379 

Even  the  streams  of  water  that  bore  the  French  into 
the  valley  have  dwindled,  many  of  them,  or  are  in 
despair  and  tears,  between  shallows  and  torrents,  long- 
ing for  the  forests,  it  is  said  by  the  scientists — longing 
for  the  days  of  the  French,  the  poet  would  put  it.  So 
are  the  rivers  crying,  "In  the  days  of  Pere  Marquette" 
— the  days  of  the  "  River  of  the  Immaculate  Concep- 
tion." And  so  are  the  prophets  of  science  crying  as 
the  prophets  of  inspiration  cried  of  old:  O  valley  of  a 
hundred  thousand  streams,  O  valley  of  a  million  cen- 
turies of  rock  and  iron  and  earth,  O  valley  of  a  century 
of  man !  The  riches  of  the  gathering  of  a  million 
years  are  spent  in  a  day.  Baldness  has  com.e  upon 
the  mountains,  as  upon  Gaza  of  old.  The  trees  have 
gone  down  to  the  waters.  The  iron  has  flowed  like 
blood  from  the  hills.  The  fire  of  the  ground  is  being 
given  to  the  air.  The  sky  is  filled  with  smoke.  The 
soil  is  being  carried  into  the  sea;  its  precious  dust  of 
nitrogen  and  phosphor  blown  to  the  ends  of  the  earth. 
The  fresh  lands  are  no  more.  There  are  no  mines  to 
be  had  for  the  asking.  The  frontier  has  become  as  the 
centre,  the  new  as  the  old. 

But  it  is  not  a  hopeless  prophecy — an  unconstruc- 
tive,  pessimistic,  lamentation.  The  way  of  reparation 
is  made  clear. 

If  I  were  to  speak  only  of  what  has  been  done  under 
the  inspiration  of  that  prophecy,  I  should  have  little 
that  is  definitely  measurable  to  present,  but  in  making 
a  catalogue  of  the  averting  advice  of  that  prophecy,  I 
am  giving  intimation  of  what  will  in  all  probability  be 
done.  For  the  people  of  that  valley  are  not  wittingly 
going  to  give  their  once  fertile  lands  as  stones,  even 
to  the  sons  of  others  who  ask  for  bread,  nor  their 


380     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

streams  as  serpents  of  pestilence  to  those  who  ask  for 
fish. 

These  are  some  of  the  items  of  their  constructive 
conservation  programme: 

Coal. — The  waste  in  the  mining  of  coal  must  be  re- 
duced from  50  and  150  per  cent  of  the  amount  taken  out 
to  25,  15,  or  10  per  cent  by  the  working  of  upper  beds 
first,  the  utilization  of  slack,  etc.1  The  reckless  waste 
of  coal  in  the  making  of  coke  can  be  prevented  by  the 
use  of  the  right  sort  of  oven.  It  is  estimated  that 
there  would  be  a  saving  of  #50,000,000  per  annum  if 
such  a  substitution  were  made.2  The  tremendous  loss 
of  the  power  value,3  from  20  to  33  per  cent,  and  of 
illuminating  value4  (99  per  cent)  in  coal  because  of  its 
imperfect  consumption  can  be  greatly  reduced  by  the 
employment  of  mechanical  stokers  and  other  devices. 
The  use  of  the  gas-engine  in  the  place  of  the  steam- 
engine,5  the  use  of  power  developed  from  water,  and 
the  diffused  carbon  dioxide  in  the  air  tempering  the 
climate  are  also  intimations  of  forces  that  may  lengthen 
the  life  of  the  coal,  99  per  cent  of  which  still  remains  in 
the  keeping  of  the  valley.     It  is  not  too  late.6 

Petroleum. — Its  probable  life  may  be  lengthened  be- 
yond ninety  years  by  its  restriction  to  lubricating  and 
illuminating  uses  only  and  by  the  prevention  of  its 
exportation.7 

Natural  Gas. — Its  flame  is  ephemeral  at  best,  but 
its  light  may  be  kept  burning  a  little  longer  if  the 
prodigious  waste  is  prevented.    During  1907  four  hun- 

1  Van  Hise,  pp.  26,  27.  2  Van  Hise,  p.  28. 

3  Van  Hise,  pp.  29,  30.  4  Van  Hise,  p.  32.  5  Van  Hise,  p.  31. 

6  See  "The  Coal  Resources  of  the  World,"  International  Geological  Con- 
gress, 1913. 

7  Van  Hise,  pp.  50-55. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  381 

dred  billion  feet  were  consumed  and  almost  as  great 
an  amount  wasted  through  uncontrolled  wells,  leaky- 
pipes,  etc.1 

Iron  (and,  in  less  measure,  gold,  silver,  and  other 
metals),  whose  life  does  not,  as  coal  and  oil  and  gas, 
perish  with  the  using,  but  some  of  whose  value  is  lost 
in  the  transformation  from  one  state  of  use  to  another, 
needs  only  to  be  more  economically  mined  and  used.2 
Non-metallic,  inexhaustible  materials,  as  stone,  clay, 
cement,  should  be  employed  in  their  stead  when  pos- 
sible.3 Every  scrap  of  iron  should  be  conserved,  cry 
our  constructive  prophets,  even  as  the  Indians  trea- 
sured it.  We  may  not  need  it,  but  succeeding  genera- 
tions will.  It  may  be  recast  to  their  use.  We  are  but 
its  trustees.4 

Forests} — A  reduction  of  the  waste  in  cutting  (this 
is  25  per  cent  of  the  total  value  of  the  timber  cut);  of 
the  waste  in  milling  and  manufacture,  and  in  turpen- 
tining. This  last  waste  is  appalling  but  preventable 
in  full  or  large  measure.  The  lessening  the  demand 
for  lumber  by  a  preservative  treatment  of  all  mer- 
chantable timber.  A  utilization  of  by-products.  (Un- 
doubtedly science  will  be  most  helpful  here.)  Precau- 
tions against  fires  and  their  control.  Reforestation. 
Maintenance  of  forests  on  what  are  called  essential 
areas,  such  as  high  altitudes  and  slopes,  as  tending  to 
prevent  floods  and  erosion.  (France  here  gives  most 
impressive  example  in  planning  to  bring  under  con- 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  58.  2  Van  Hise,  p.  68. 

5 1  watched  day  by  day  for  weeks  the  erection  of  a  great  building  in 
Paris,  and  I  noticed  how  little  iron  or  steel  was  used  as  compared  with 
that  in  such  structures  in  New  York.     We  shall  undoubtedly  come  to  that. 

4  See,  "Iron  Ore  Resources  of  the  World,"  International  Geological  Con- 
gress, 1910. 

6  Van  Hise,  pp.  223-262. 


382     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

trol  about  three  thousand  torrential  streams  in  the 
Alps,  Pyrenees,  Ardennes,  and  Cevennes  by  means, 
partly  at  least,  of  afforestation,  #14,000,000  out  of 
$40,000,000  being  provided  for  this  purpose.1  Italy, 
because  of  the  greatly  increased  destruction  by  the 
Po,  has  begun  the  reforestation  of  the  Apennines  to 
the  extent  of  a  million  acres.)  Battle  with  insect  pests 
and  finally  the  substitution  of  other  materials  for 
wood,  thus  not  only  saving  the  trees  but  diminishing 
the  losses  by  fire. 

Land.7, — The  control  of  water  to  prevent  erosion, 
deep  tillage,  and  contour  ploughing.  The  restoration 
of  nitrogen  and  phosphorus  by  rotation  of  crops,  phos- 
phates, fertilizers,  and  electricity.  The  destruction  of 
noxious  insects,  mammals,  and  weeds.  The  reclama- 
tion of  wet  lands.  The  introduction  of  new  varieties 
of  crops. 

Water. — A  fuller  use  in  the  place  of  other  sources 
of  power  that  are  exhausted  in  use.  It  is  believed  that 
of  the  twenty-six  million  horse-power  now  developed 
by  coal  fifteen  million  could  be  more  economically  de- 
veloped by  water,  thus  saving  not  only  #180,000,000 
by  the  substitution,  but  150,000,000  tons  of  coal  for 
posterity.3  The  leading  of  this  power  through  longer 
distances,  as  from  Niagara  Falls;  its  impounding  for  a 
more  steady  supply;4  the  digging  of  channels  of  irri- 
gation into  arid  places;5  the  drainage  of  wet  regions; 
the  fuller  utilization  of  the  carrying  power  of  water  to 
relieve  the  costlier  use  of  wheels.6  Making  the  escap- 
ing, unsatisfying  stream  of  Sisyphus  turn  the  mills  of 
the  gods. 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  247.  2  Van  Hise,  pp.  307-352. 

3  Van  Hise,  p.  124.  *  Van  Hise,  pp.  125-133. 

8  Van  Hise,  pp.  185-207.  •  Van  Hise,  p.  164. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  383 

This  is,  indeed,  as  the  writing  of  that  ancient  prophet 
of  Israel  who,  in  his  vision  of  the  restoration  of  his 
city  and  his  land  and  the  healing  of  its  waters,  saw  a 
man  with  a  radiant  face,  a  line  of  flax  in  his  hand  and 
a  measuring  reed.  And  wherever  this  man  of  radiant 
face  measured  he  caused  the  waters  to  run  in  dry- 
places  and  deep  rivers  to  course  where  the  waters  were 
but  ankle-deep;  fish  to  swarm  again  in  the  rivers  and 
the  seas  to  be  free  of  pollution;  salt  to  come  in  the 
miry  places  and  trees  to  grow  upon  the  land  with  un- 
withering  leaves  and  abundant  meat. 

So  have  these  modern  prophets  with  optimistic 
faces  written  of  their  vision,  only  the  fulfilment  comes 
not  simply  of  the  constructive  measuring  of  statistics. 
It  takes  some  trees  a  hundred  years  to  grow;  and  dams 
and  reservoirs  for  the  deepening  of  shallow  streams  are 
not  made  over  night  as  once  they  were  by  nature,  or 
as  they  grew  in  the  vision  of  Ezekiel. 

None  the  less  is  the  prophecy  a  long  way  toward 
fulfilment  when  the  vision  is  seen.  And  that  it  has 
been  seen  is  intimated  by  this  sentence,  too  optimistic 
no  doubt,  from  a  book  on  the  subject  by  one  of  the 
major  prophets  of  conservation,  recently  published  in 
America.  "Conservation,"  he  says,  "has  captured  the 
nation." 

It  is  not  the  thrifty,  nepotic,  static  conservation  of 
the  St.  Lawrence  habitant,  which  depends  upon  the 
self  and  family  interest  of  each  landholder  to  keep  the 
fields  enriched  and  to  prevent  the  washing  away  of 
the  soil.  It  is  a  dynamic  and  paternalistic  conserva- 
tion— a  conservation  that  thinks  of  great  dams  for  the 
restraint  of  waters  and  reservoirs  for  their  impound- 
ing to  the  extent  of  millions  or  billions  of  cubic  feet, 


384    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

forestation  of  great  stretches  of  mountain  slope,  of 
restrictions  and  compulsions  of  other  than  personal  and 
family  interests — a  paternalism  that  looks  beyond  the 
next  generation  or  even  two  generations  and  to  the 
feeding  of  other  children  than  one's  own  lineal  descend- 
ants— a  paternalism  that  is  not  exploiting  but  fiduciary. 

It  is  interesting  to  observe  again  how  the  beginnings 
of  this  conservation  have  been  made  in  the  fields 
where  stood  the  first  hospitals  for  the  sick  among  the 
living,  the  first  memorials  to  the  dead,  the  first  schools 
for  the  children  of  to-day  that  are  to  be  the  nation  of 
to-morrow.  Here  also  begin  to  rise  the  structures  of 
the  thought  for  the  day  after  to-morrow. 

The  first  notable  assembling  of  men  in  the  interest 
of  conservation,  chiefly  of  men  already  in  public  service 
— the  President  of  the  United  States,  the  Vice-Presi- 
dent, members  of  the  cabinet,  justices  of  the  Supreme 
Court,  members  of  Congress,  the  governors  of  thirty- 
four  States,  representatives  of  the  other  States,  the 
governors  of  the  Territories,  and  other  public  officials, 
with  a  number  of  representatives  of  societies  and  a 
few  guests — met  in  1908,  to  discuss  questions  relative 
to  conservation.  Probably  not  in  the  history  of  the 
nation  has  there  sat  in  its  borders  an  assembly  of  men 
so  widely  representative.  This  gathering  resulted  in 
the  appointment  of  a  National  Conservation  Commis- 
sion by  the  President,  but  Congress  made  no  appro- 
priation for  meeting  the  expense  of  its  labors;  and  so 
private  enterprise  and  providence  have  undertaken  the 
carrying  out  of  the  movement. 

A  great  body  of  men  and  women  scientists,  public- 
spirited  citizens  from  all  parts  of  the  nation,  under  the 
presidency  of  Doctor  Charles  W.  Eliot,  former  president 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  385 

of  Harvard  University,  began  a  campaign  of  educa- 
tion to  the  end  that  ultimately  and  soon — before  the 
riches  have  gone — this  concern  for  the  far  future  may 
become  fixed  in  the  law  and  conscious  provision  of  the 
people. 

I  spoke  in  the  last  chapter  of  Hennepin's  seeing  a 
savage  making  sacrifice  to  the  spirit  of  the  Mississippi, 
supposed  to  live  under  the  Falls  of  St.  Anthony.  You 
will  recall  the  description  of  the  great  public  univer- 
sity beside  it  that  represents  the  sacrifice  of  the  de- 
mocracy of  to-day  for  the  nation  of  to-morrow.  In- 
stead of  the  beaver-skin  which  the  poor  Indian  hung 
in  the  branches  of  a  tree  near  the  falls  as  his  offering, 
the  State  has  hung  its  gift  of  forty  million  dollars  for 
the  highest  training  of  its  sons  and  daughters.  But 
there  is  still,  if  possible,  a  nobler  aspiration  to  put 
against  that  primitive  background  and  beside  the  In- 
dian's beaver-skin,  for  the  gift  is  as  yet  little  more  than 
an  aspiration. 

A  few  miles  back  from  these  same  falls  there  was 
held  in  1910  a  convention  of  many  thousands  from  all 
parts  of  the  Union,  the  President  of  the  United  States 
and  his  predecessor  among  them,  assembled  under  the 
auspices  of  the  National  Conservation  Congress  to 
consider,  as  they  avowed,  not  alone  their  own  affairs, 
not  even  the  good  of  their  children  with  theirs,  but 
primarily  the  welfare  of  unborn  millions  as  well.  It 
cannot  be  assumed  that  all  were  looking  so  far  ahead, 
but  the  declaration  of  principles  which  had  called  this 
great  assemblage  had  in  it  this  import — something 
loftier  than  any  declaration  of  personal  rights.  It  was 
a  declaration  of  duty — of  duty  not  to  the  past,  not  even 
to  the  present,  but  to  the  long,  long  distant  future. 


386     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

"Recognizing  the  natural  resources  of  the  country 
as  the  prime  basis  of  property  and  opportunity,  we 
hold  the  rights  of  the  people  in  these  resources  to  be 
natural  and  inherent  and  justly  inalienable  and  in- 
defeasible; and  we  insist  that  the  resources  should  and 
shall  be  developed,  used,  and  conserved  in  ways  con- 
sistent with  current  welfare  and  with  the  perpetuity  of 
our  people." 

When  this  or  a  like  sentiment  is  framed  out  of  the 
consciousness  of  a  free  people  into  a  controlling  decla- 
ration of  public  policy,  we  shall  have  not  merely  a 
nobler  offering  to  put  beside  the  beaver-skin  and  the 
university,  but  a  document  worthy  to  be  put  above 
our  Declaration  of  Independence  even,  and  an  inter- 
pretation of  the  words  "the  people  of  the  United 
States"  in  our  Constitution  that  will  give  them  an 
import  beyond  the  highest  conception  of  its  authors. 

The  movement  which  embodies  this  sentiment  is  as 
yet  chiefly  a  private  effort,  as  I  have  said,  but  its  in- 
fluence is  beginning  to  run  through  the  sentiment  of 
the  individualism  which  has  so  rapidly  exploited  the 
riches  of  the  valley  and  spent  with  such  generous  hand 
for  the  immediate  future.  And  the  boundaries  of 
public  service  are  already  enlarged  in  making  room  for 
the  previsions  of  the  "Children  of  Always,"  as  the 
mankind  now  in  the  thought  of  conservationists  may 
well  be  called. 

Already  millions  of  acres  of  coal  lands  have  been 
withdrawn  from  private  entry,  and  plans  are  being 
made  for  the  leasing  of  such  lands;  that  is,  the  people 
are  to  keep  them  for  their  own. 

Like  provision  has  also  been  made  with  respect  to 
oil,  natural  gas,  and  phosphate  fields. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  387 

Forest  lands  to  the  extent  of  nearly  two  hundred 
million  acres  have  been  reserved  as  a  perpetual  national 
domain,  and,  in  addition  to  this,  several  States  have 
forest  reservations  amounting  to  nearly  ten  million 
acres.1  The  volume  of  forest  legislation  in  the  States 
is  unprecedented,  providing  for  forest  service,  forest 
study,  and  the  prevention  of  forest-fires,  with  a  pros- 
pect of  laws  providing  for  a  more  rigid  public  control 
of  private  forests. 

An  increasing  public  control  of  waters  is  another 
noticeable  trend  in  legislation,  and  their  increased 
utilization  has  already  been  noticed.  Joliet's  canal 
has  been  built.  Champlain's  is  at  last  completed.  A 
President  of  the  United  States  has  recommended  the 
deepening  of  La  Salle's  river.  The  valley  is  coming 
back  to  the  French  paths.  These  and  many  others 
are  conservation  projects  only  indirectly,  but  they  in- 
timate a  thought  of  the  future  as  do  the  heavy  appro- 
priations for  the  reclamation  of  arid  and  subarid  regions, 
the  government  having  spent  seventy  million  dollars2 
in  such  undertakings,  making  "one  hand  wash  the 
other,"  as  our  saying  is;  that  is,  making  the  well- 
watered  regions  meet  the  expense  of  watering  the  arid. 

And,  finally,  the  States  are  beginning  to  take  most 
serious  and  even  radical  measures  to  encourage  farmers 
so  to  till  their  fields  as  to  be  able  to  bequeath  them  un- 
impoverished  to  those  who  come  after.  I  think  it  not 
unlikely  that  eventually  the  demos,  thinking  of  the 
future,  will  be  as  paternalistic  as  was  Louis  XIV,  who 
told  the  habitant  of  the  St.  Lawrence  how  many  horses 
he  should  keep. 

This  review  of  the  resources  of  the  valley  of  France 

1  Van  Hise,  pp.  216,  217.  *To  June  1,  1912. 


388     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

in  the  midst  of  America,  and  of  the  forces  that  are  now- 
assembling  to  preserve  for  posterity  its  vast  capital  of 
earth,  air,  and  water,  is  but  an  intimation  of  what 
might  easily  be  expanded  into  a  volume  of  itself. 
Indeed,  much  of  my  statistical  material  I  have  from  a 
book  by  Doctor  Charles  R.  Van  Hise,  president  of  the 
University  of  Wisconsin;  but,  meagre  as  this  review  is, 
it  must  give  you,  as  it  has  given  me,  a  stirring  sense  of 
the  mighty  reach  of  the  paths  of  those  few  pioneers  of 
France  in  those  regions  where  the  spirit  of  conservation 
is  strongest. 

While  it  is  true  that  every  human  life,  as  Carlyle 
has  said,  stands  at  the  conflux  of  two  eternities — the 
one  behind  him,  the  other  before — in  a  sense  have  the 
material  preparations,  extending  during  a  length  of 
time  that  to  our  measurement  seems  an  eternity,  con- 
verged upon  and  in  those  pioneers  of  Europe  in  that 
valley;  and  from  them  has  diverged  a  civilization  that 
now  begins  to  look  forward  in  the  eyes  of  her  pro- 
phets through  years  that  seem  as  another  eternity. 
Probably,  says  this  eminent  scientist  of  that  valley, 
speaking  of  the  past,  "some  of  the  deposits  at  present 
being  mined  are  the  result  of  agents  ...  a  hundred 
million  years  ago";1  and  of  the  future:  "We  hope  for 
a  future  .  .  .  not  to  be  reckoned  by  thousands  of 
years  but  by  tens  of  thousands  or  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands or  even  millions  of  years.  And,  therefore,  so 
far  as  our  responsibility  is  concerned,  it  is  immaterial 
whether  the  coal  will  be  exhausted  in  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years  or  fifteen  hundred  years,  or  fifteen  thousand 
years.  Our  responsibility  to  succeeding  generations 
demands  that  we  reduce  its  use  to  our  absolute  neces- 

1  Van  Hise,  p.  18. 


"THE  MEN  OF  ALWAYS"  389 

sides,  and  therefore  prolong  its  life  to  the  utmost.*'1 
Conservation  has  in  such  depth  of  years  given  a 
new  perspective  to  the  picture  we  have  been  painting 
of  the  life  in  that  valley.  The  French  were  pioneers 
not  merely  of  an  exploiting  individualism  of  a  day,  or 
of  a  hundred  or  two  hundred  years,  not  merely  of  a 
democracy  thinking  of  an  equality  of  the  men  of  one 
generation,  but  also  of  the  conserving  dynamic  civili- 
zation of  hundreds  of  centuries  of  a  people — to  come 
back  again  to  that  best  of  definitions — who  are  the  in- 
visible multitude  of  spirits,  the  nation  of  yesterday  and 
to-morrow. 

The  French  priest,  kneeling  over  the  dying  Indian 
child  in  the  forest  hut  and  stealthily  touching  its 
brow  with  water,  had  vision  of  another  immortality 
than  that,  as  we  know;  the  empire  which  the  French 
explorers  and  adventurers  hoped  to  build  with  its 
capital  on  the  Rock  of  Quebec,  or  on  the  Rock  St. 
Louis  of  the  Illinois,  or  at  the  mouth  of  the  Missis- 
sippi did  not  grow  in  the  fashion  of  their  dream,  as  we 
of  course  realize.  But  we  see,  on  the  other  hand,  what 
promise  of  ages  has  been  given  to  the  faith  and  adven- 
ture which  found  incarnation  in  a  frontier  democracy 
whose  energy  and  spirit  made  possible  the  great,  lusty 
republic  of  to-day,  that  now  begins  to  talk  of  a  thou- 
sand centuries. 

Out  in  that  far  west,  in  a  recent  autumn,  the  men  of 
the  standing  army  were  set  to  fighting  forest-fires. 
This  has  seemed  to  me  a  happy  omen  of  what  the  new 
conservatism  of  the  world  may  ask  of  its  soldiery — 
the  conserving  not  of  borders  but  of  the  resources  of 
human  life  and  of  human  life  itself.     And  so  have  I 

x  Van  Hise,  p.  25. 


39Q    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

added  another  class  to  the  inhabitants  of  the  valley, 
to  the  precursors,  the  producers,  the  poets,  and  the 
teachers  of  to-morrow — the  conservers  of  the  day  after 
to-morrow. 

Our  great  philosopher  William  James  gave  expres- 
sion in  one  of  his  last  utterances  to  a  hope  that  every 
man,  rich  or  poor,  may  come  to  serve  the  State  (as 
now  every  man  in  France  does  his  military  service)  in 
some  direct  duty  that  asks  the  same  obedience,  the 
same  sacrifice,  the  same  forgetting  of  self  that  is  asked 
of  the  soldier — that  every  man  by  the  payment  of  the 
blood  tax  may  be  able  to  get  and  keep  the  spirit  of 
neighborliness,  to  know  how  to  sympathize  more  deeply 
with  his  fellow  men,  and  to  learn  the  joy  of  disinterested 
doing  for  the  nation.1 

But  in  this  demand  and  appeal  of  the  new  theory 
of  our  common  responsibility,  of  a  dynamic  conser- 
vationism,  is  the  germ  of  a  larger  patriotism  than  any 
that  history  has  as  yet  defined — a  patriotism  that  asks 
the  lifetime  service  of  an  individualism  with  an  all- 
time  horizon. 

1  "Memories  and  Studies:  The  Moral  Equivalent  of  War,"  pp.  267-296. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

IN  the  little  town  of  St.  Die  in  the  east  of  France 
there  was  printed  in  the  year  1507  a  "Cosmog- 
raphiae  Introductio" — an  introduction  to  a  forth- 
coming edition  of  Ptolemy — in  which  was  included  an 
account  of  the  journeys  of  one  Amerigo  Vespucci,  who 
is  credited  with  the  discovery  of  a  new  part  of  the 
world — a  fourth  continent.  For  this  reason,  the  author 
recites,  "quarta  orbis  pars,  quam  quis  Americus  in- 
venit,  Amerigen  quasi  Americi  terram,  sivi  Americam 
nuncupare  licit."  And  so  the  name  America  (for  it 
was  thought  proper  to  give  it  the  feminine  form, 
"cum  et  Europa  et  Asia  a  mulieribus  sua  sortitae  sint 
nomina")  was  probably  first  pronounced  in  the  moun- 
tain-circled town  of  St.  Die,  where  the  scholars  of  the 
Vosges,  shut  away  from  the  sea  and  its  greedy  rumors 
of  India,  conceived  more  accurately  in  their  isolation 
the  significance  of  the  western  discoveries  and  made  the 
new-found  shores  the  edge  not  of  Asia  but  of  another 
continent. 

Perhaps  this  new  land  should  have  been  given  some 
other  name;  but  that  it  is  futile  now  to  discuss.  Amer- 
ica it  has  been  these  four  hundred  years  and  America 
it  is  doubtless  always  to  be.  And  it  is  particularly 
gratifying  to  one  who  has  come  to  care  so  much  for 
France  to  find  that  the  name  of  his  own  land — a  name 
most  euphonious  and  delectable  to  his  ears — came  of 

391 


392  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  christening  at  the  font  of  the  River  Meurthe,  the 
beautiful  French  dame  of  St.  Die  standing  by  as  god- 
mother, and  that  that  name  was  first  whispered  to  the 
world  by  the  trees  of  the  forests  of  the  Vosges,  whose 
wood  may  even  have  furnished  the  blocks  to  fashion 
first  its  letters.  So  may  we  go  back  and  write  this  in- 
teresting if  not  important  fact  of  French  pioneering  in 
America. 

But  let  us  rehearse  to  ourselves  once  more  before 
we  separate  the  epic  sequence  of  adventure  and  suffer- 
ing which  tells  how  much  more  than  a  name  France 
gave  to  that  continent  just  rising  from  the  seas  when 
the  savants  of  St.  Die  touched  her  face  with  the  bap- 
tismal water  of  their  recluse  learning. 

Again  the  "boundless  vision  grows  upon  us;  an  un- 
tamed continent;  vast  wastes  of  forest  verdure;  moun- 
tains silent  in  primeval  sleep;  river,  lake,  and  glim- 
mering pool;  wilderness  oceans  mingling  with  the  sky" 
— the  America  not  of  the  imaging  of  the  mountain  men 
of  St.  Die  but  of  the  seeing  and  enduring  of  the  sea- 
men of  Dieppe  and  St.  Malo  and  Rochelle  and  Rouen. 

Again  Jacques  Cartier  stands  alone  within  this 
"shaggy  continent,"  a  thousand  miles  beyond  the 
banks  of  the  Baccalaos  and  the  Isles  of  the  Demons. 
Again  for  a  moment  Acadia  echoes  of  the  Sorbonne  and 
of  Arcadian  poesy.  Again  the  unblenching  "preux 
chevalier"  Champlain  stands  with  his  back  against  the 
gray  cliff  of  Quebec  fighting  red  and  white  foe  alike, 
famine  and  disease,  to  keep  a  foothold  in  the  wilder- 
ness, with  the  sublime  faith  of  a  crusader  and  the  pa- 
tient endurance  of  a  Prometheus.  Again  the  zealous  but 
narrow  rigor  of  Richelieu,  flowering  in  his  native  land 
in  the  learning  of  the  Sorbonne  and  preparing  for  him 


THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA  393 

in  the  new  world,  as  Le  Jeune  wrote,  a  "dazzling 
crown  in  heaven,"  builds  by  the  St.  Charles  and  the 
wreckage  of  Cartier's  Petite  Hermine,  the  house  of 
Notre  Dame  des  Anges,  the  "cradle  of  the  great  mis- 
sion of  New  France."  Again  the  fireflies  light  the 
meadow  altar  of  Maisonneuve  at  Montreal  on  its  birth- 
night.  Again  the  gray  gowns  and  the  black,  Le  Caron, 
Brebeuf,  Jogues,  and  Gamier,  enter  upon  their  glorious 
toils,  their  bare  and  sandalled  feet,  accustomed  to  the 
smooth  walks  of  the  convents  of  Brouage  and  Rheims 
and  Paris,  begin  to  climb  the  rough  paths  to  the  west, 
ad  majorem  Dei  gloriam.  Again  the  swift  coureurs  de 
bois,  half-savage  in  their  ambassadorship  of  the  woods, 
follow  the  traces  of  the  most  ancient  road-makers,  the 
buffalo  and  deer,  and  the  voyageurs  carry  their  boats 
across  the  portage  places.  Again  the  Griffin — the 
winged  lion  of  the  lakes — flies  from  Niagara  to  the  is- 
land in  Green  Bay,  France's  percursor  of  the  million- 
tonned  commerce  of  the  northern  seas,  but  sinks  with 
her  cargo  of  golden  fleece  in  their  blue  waters.  Again 
Marquette,  the  son  of  Laon,  beholds  with  joy  unspeak- 
able the  mysterious  "great  water,"  and  yet  again,  La 
Salle  stands  by  the  lonely  sea  and  cries  his  proclama- 
tion toward  the  limitless  land. 

And,  seeing  and  hearing  all  this  again,  we  have  seen 
a  land  as  large  as  all  Europe  emerge  from  the  unknown 
at  the  evocation  of  pioneers  of  France  who  stood  all  or 
nearly  all  sooner  or  later  in  Paris  within  three  or  four 
kilometres  of  the  very  place  in  which  I  sit  writing  these 
words.  Cartier  gave  to  the  world  the  St.  Lawrence 
River  as  far  as  the  Falls  of  Lachine;  Champlain,  his 
Recollet  friars  and  Jesuit  priests  and  heralds  of  the 
woods  added  the  upper  lakes;   and  Marquette,  Joliet, 


394    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

La  Salle,  Tonty,  Hennepin,  Radisson,  Groseilliers,  Iber- 
ville, Bienville,  Le  Sueur,  La  Harpe,  the  Verendrye — 
father  and  sons — and  scores  of  other  Frenchmen,  many 
of  forgotten  names,  added  the  valley  of  the  river  of  a 
hundred  thousand  streams,  from  where  at  the  east 
the  French  creek  begins,  a  few  miles  from  Lake  Erie,  to 
flow  toward  the  Ohio  even  to  the  sources  of  the  Mis- 
souri in  the  snows  of  the  Rockies — "the  most  magnifi- 
cent dwelling-place" — again  to  recall  De  Tocqueville, 
"prepared  by  God  for  man's  abode;  the  valley  destined 
to  give  the  world  a  field  for  a  new  experiment  in  de- 
mocracy and  to  become  the  heart  of  America." 

I  have  not  been  able  to  write  at  any  length  of  that 
part  of  all  this  vast  region  of  France's  pioneering  and 
evoking  where  France  is  best  remembered — remem- 
bered in  speech  that  imitates  that  which  is  dearest  to 
France's  ears;  remembered  in  voices  that  even  in  the 
harsh  winds  of  the  north  keep  something  of  the  mel- 
lowness and  softness  of  the  south;  remembered  in  the 
surnames  that  recall  beautiful  trees  and  fields  of  per- 
fume and  hills  of  vines  and  things  of  the  sea  which 
surrounded  their  ancestors;  remembered  in  the  ap- 
pellations of  the  saints  that  protect  their  firesides  and 
their  fortunes;  remembered  in  the  names  that  still 
cling  tenaciously  to  rivers  and  towns  of  that  land  which 
calls  Champlain  its  father — Canada. 

A  traveller  in  the  lower  St.  Lawrence  Valley  might 
well  think  himself  east  of  the  Atlantic  as  he  hears  the 
guard  on  the  railway  train  from  Montreal  to  Quebec 
call:  St.  Rochs,  Les  Eboulements,  Portneuf,  Pont 
Rouge,  Capucins,  Mont  Louis,  Pointe  au  Chene;  or 
hears  the  speech  as  he  walks  at  the  foot  of  the  gray 
Rock  of  Quebec,  or  even  reads  the  street  signs  in  Mon- 


THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA  395 

treal.  There  are  memories  there  on  every  side,  in 
their  very  houses  and  habits — yet  memories  which  I 
fear  are  beginning  to  fade  with  the  allurements  of  the 
land  of  hope  to  the  far  west  and  the  northwest  of 
Canada — the  "land  of  hope,"  the  new  frontier  of  Amer- 
ica, now  of  such  interest  to  the  people  of  that  other 
valley,  the  Mississippi,  which  was  once  separated  from 
Canada  by  no  boundaries  save  watersheds,  and  these 
so  low  that  there  was  reciprocity  of  their  waters. 

But  even  if  I  could  keep  you  longer  I  am  thinking 
that  I  should  have  asked  you  to  spend  it  where  there 
are  fewer  memories  than  in  Canada,  in  the  valley  where 
the  old  French  names,  if  kept  at  all,  are  often  obscured 
in  a  new  orthography  or  a  different  pronunciation. 
Up  in  the  boundary  of  waters  between  the  two  lands 
there  is  a  lighthouse  on  an  island  called  "Skilligallee." 
I  was  a  long  time  in  discovering  that  this  meaningless 
euphonic  name  was  but  the  memory  of  the  Isle  aux 
Galets — the  island  of  the  pebbles.  So  have  the  mem- 
ories been  lost  in  tongues  that  could  not  easily  frame  to 
pronounce  the  words  they  found  when  they  entered 
that  farther  valley  where  France's  pioneering  is  almost 
forgotten,  but  where  France  should  be  best  remembered. 

A  catalogue  (and  this  book  has  been  little  else)  of 
the  reasons  for  such  remembrance  has  doubtless  brought 
little  comfort;  indeed,  it  may  have  brought  some  pain, 
because  the  recital  of  the  reasons  has  but  emphasized 
the  forgetting  and  accentuated  the  loss. 

But  is  France  not  to  find,  in  a  fuller  consciousness  of 
what  has  developed  in  that  valley  into  which  she  led 
Europe,  a  higher  satisfaction  than  could  have  come 
through  the  formal  relationship  of  mother  and  colony, 
or  any  other  that  could  be  reasonably  conjectured  ? 


396     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

For  Turgot's  prophecy  would  have  some  day  been 
realized,  and  there  would  perhaps  have  been  a  bitter- 
ness where  now  there  is  gratitude.  I  can  think  of  no 
series  of  relations  that  could  have  been  of  more  pro- 
found and  momentous  import  in  the  history  of  that 
continent,  or  that  should  give  higher  satisfaction  to 
France  in  her  thought  of  America  than  that  which  this 
summation  permits  us  to  recall  once  more. 

France  not  only  christened  America;  she  not  only 
stood  first  far  inside  that  continent  at  the  north  and 
furnished  Europe  proof  of  its  mighty  dimensions;  she 
also  gave  to  this  continent,  child  of  her  christening,  the 
richest  great  valley  of  the  world. 

This  valley  she  held  in  the  title  of  her  own  claim 
for  more  than  a  century  from  the  time  that  her  ex- 
plorers first  looked  over  its  brim,  held  it  by  valors 
and  sufferings  which  would  have  been  gloriously  re- 
corded if  their  issue  had  been  to  keep  by  those 
waters  the  tongue  in  which  they  could  be  written  and 
sung. 

When  France  did  yield  it,  because  of  forces  outside 
the  valley,  not  inside  (there  was  hardly  a  sound  of 
battle  there),  she  gave  it  in  effect  to  a  new  nation. 
She  shared  it  with  the  aboriginal  American,  she  gave 
it  to  the  ultimate  American.  She  got  her  title  from 
the  first  Americans  who,  as  Chateaubriand  said,  called 
themselves  the  "Children  of  Always."  She  gave  it  to 
those  who  are  beginning  to  think  of  it  as  belonging  not 
to  them  but  to  the  new  "Children  of  Always." 

By  her  very  valorous  holding  she  taught  the  fringe 
of  colonies  along  the  Atlantic  the  first  lessons  in  union, 
and  she  gave  them  a  leader  out  of  the  disciplines  of 
her  borders,  George  Washington,  whom  in  the  course 


THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA  397 

of  time  she  directly  assisted  with  her  sympathy  and 
means  to  make  certain  the  independence  of  those  same 
colonies. 

He,  in  turn,  in  the  paths  of  the  Old  French  War 
across  the  Alleghanies,  found  by  a  most  singular  fate 
not  only  the  indissoluble  bond  between  the  eastern  and 
the  western  waters  but  in  those  very  paths  the  prac- 
tical way  to  the  more  "perfect  union"  of  the  young 
nation  that  was  to  succeed  to  this  joint  heritage  of  Eng- 
land and  of  France. 

To  its  estate  of  hundreds  of  millions  of  acres  east  of 
the  Mississippi  Napoleon  added  a  half-billion  more 
out  of  the  one-time  domain  of  Louis  XIV  and  made  it 
possible  that  the  United  States  should  some  day  de- 
velop into  a  world-power. 

The  half-valley,  enlarged  to  its  mountain  bounds 
through  the  influence  of  its  free  soil  on  those  whose 
feet  touched  it  as  pioneers,  nourished  a  natural  de- 
mocracy founded  in  the  equalities,  the  freedoms,  and 
the  fraternities  of  the  frontier  so  vital,  so  powerful 
that  it  became  the  dominant  nationalistic  force  in  a 
continent-wide  republic.  Aided  by  the  means  of  com- 
munication which  a  rampant  individualism  had  pre- 
pared for  it,  it  held  that  republic  together,  expressing 
itself  most  conspicuously  in  the  democratic  soul  of 
Lincoln — who,  following  La  Salle  down  the  Mississippi, 
found  his  high  mission  to  the  world — and  in  the  master- 
ful, resourceful  generalship  of  Grant. 

The  old  French  forts  have  grown  into  new-world 
cities,  the  portage  paths  have  been  multiplied  into 
streets,  the  trails  of  the  coureurs  de  bois  have  become 
railroads,  and  all  are  the  noisy,  flaming,  smoky  places 
and  means  of  such  an  industry  and  exploitation  as 


398     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

doubtless  are  not  to  be  found  so  extensive  and  so  in- 
tensive in  any  other  valley  of  the  earth. 

A  quantitative  analysis  has  led  me  to  present  sta- 
tistics of  its  production  and  manufacture  which  would 
seem  inexcusably  braggart  if  it  were  not  to  remind  the 
French  and  my  own  countrymen  that  it  was  the  geo- 
graphical descendants  of  France  who,  out  of  the  wealth 
of  their  heritage  of  France's  bequeathing,  untouched 
from  the  glaciers  and  the  Indians,  were  confuting  with 
their  wheat  the  prophecies  of  Malthus  and  making 
the  whole  world  a  more  comfortable  and  a  somewhat 
brighter  place  with  their  iron,  their  oil,  their  reapers, 
their  wagons,  and  their  sewing-machines.  It  were 
nothing  to  be  ashamed  of  unless  that  were  all. 

But  a  careful  qualitative  analysis  discovers  in  the 
life  of  that  valley,  which  has  been  so  widely  advertised 
by  its  purely  quantitative  output,  a  certain  idealism 
that  is  usually  obscured  by  the  smoke  of  its  individual- 
ism. 

We  have  seen  it  in  the  grimy  ravine  by  old  Fort 
Duquesne,  where,  like  the  titanium  which,  in  what 
way  no  chemist  knows,  increases  the  tensile  strength 
of  its  steel,  this  practical  idealism  gives  promise  of  a 
democracy  that  will  stand  a  greater  stress  and  strain. 

We  have  seen  it  in  the  plans  for  the  future  of  the 
city  that  has  risen  from  the  onion  field  along  the 
Chicago  River,  where  Marquette's  spirit  lived  in  a  sick 
body  through  a  bitter  winter. 

We  have  seen  it  in  the  setting  apart  of  the  white 
acres  in  every  township  for  the  training  of  the  child  of 
to-morrow,  in  the  higher  school  that  stands  in  thou- 
sands of  towns  and  cities  throughout  the  valley,  and  in 
the  university  supported  of  every  State  in  that  valley, 


THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA  399 

such  as  that  which  we  saw  beside  the  falls  where  Henne- 
pin tells  of  the  Indian  sacrificing  his  beaver-skin  to  the 
river  spirit. 

And,  finally,  we  have  seen  the  men  of  to-day,  rising 
to  that  highest  definition  of  a  people — the  invisible 
multitude  of  spirits,  the  nation  of  yesterday  and  of 
to-morrow — forgetting  their  interests  of  the  moment, 
listening  to  the  men  of  the  universities  speaking  out 
of  the  past,  and  planning  for  the  conservation  of  what 
they  have  left  to  them  of  the  resources  of  the  land  for 
the  "interests  of  mankind" — the  true  "Children  of 
Always." 

This,  then,  is  what  France  has  prepared  the  way 
for,  in  one  of  the  vast  regions  where  she  was  pioneer  in 
America.  Through  the  venture  and  the  faith  of  her 
sons  she  won  the  valley  with  a  past  of  a  million  of 
ages;  through  unrecorded  valors  she  held  it  as  her 
very  own  for  a  century,  and,  though  she  lost  nominal 
title  to  it  as  a  territory,  she  has  a  ground-rent  interest 
in  it,  real  title  to  a  share  in  its  human  fruitage,  which 
time  can  neither  take  away  nor  cloud  but  only  aug- 
ment. 

The  social  and  industrial  life  which  has  developed 
there  by  mere  coincidence,  or  of  direct  cause,  is  dis- 
tinctive and  peculiar  to  that  part  of  the  United  States 
which  has  a  French  background,  though  it  now  has 
made  itself  felt  throughout  the  nation.  And,  however 
little  in  its  feature  and  language  the  foreground  may 
seem  to  take  color  of  it,  I  shall  always  believe  that  the 
consecration  of  the  rivers  and  paths,  by  explorations 
and  ministries  that  were  for  the  most  part  as  unselfish 
as  France's  scholarship  is  to-day,  must  in  some  subtle 
way  have  had  such  a  potency  as  the  catalytic  sub- 


400    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

stances  which  work  miracles  in  matter  and  yet  are  be- 
yond the  discerning  of  the  scientist. 

An  English  essayist1  has  estimated  that  we  of  the 
United  States  are  no  longer  young  and  finds  in  the 
fact  that  we  have  produced  great  artists  the  intima- 
tions of  age.  The  art  of  Whistler  and  the  letters  of 
Henry  James  are  to  him  the  "sweet  and  startling"  but 
"unmistakable  cry  of  a  dying  man."  But  this  essayist 
could  not  have  known  the  men  of  the  valley  which  is 
the  heart  of  the  nation  as  it  is  the  heart  of  the  coun- 
try, the  place  of  its  dominant  spirits.  That  valley,  so 
rapidly  exploited  of  its  resources  that  it  has  grown  ages 
poorer,  is  yet  virile,  youthful  in  its  faults  and  its  achieve- 
ments. It  has  no  "fine  futility"  as  yet,  and  the  cry  is 
not  "sweet"  though  it  may  be  "startling."  It  is  the 
shout  of  a  young  god,  of  a  Jason  driving  the  bulls  in 
the  fields  of  Colchis.  The  attenuations  of  distance 
may  easily  deceive  one's  ears  who  listens  from  across 
the  ocean  and  the  mountains. 

I  think  it  was  this  same  essayist  who  said  that  to 
understand  a  people  one  must  study  them  with  the 
"loyalty  of  a  child"  and  the  patience  not  of  a  scientist 
but  of  a  poet.  I  thank  him  for  that,  while  I  excuse  his 
confounding  of  sounds  that  he  hears  in  England  from 
America,  and  agree  that  what  we  need  in  that  valley 
to  tell  its  story,  to  interpret  it,  is  not  a  specialist  in 
statistics  nor  an  annalist,  not  a  critic  who  looks  at  the 
smoke  of  the  chimneys  and  visits  the  slaughter-houses 
only,  but  a  poet  who  will  have  the  patience  to  consult 
both  the  statistician  and  the  annalist,  a  patient  poet 
with  the  "loyalty  of  a  child"  toward  his  theme. 

1 G.  K.  Chesterton,  "The  Fallacy  of  the  Young  Nation,"  in  his  "Heretics," 
pp.  247-266. 


EPILOGUE 

FRANCIS  PARKMAN 

The  Historian  of  France  in  the  New  World 

I  MAKE  the  epilogue  of  this  story  my  tribute  to 
Francis  Parkman,  who  has  in  a  sense  made  this  all 
possible  for  me:  first,  by  reason  of  the  love  he  gave 
me  long  ago  for  his  New  France  with  its  primeval 
forests,  its  virgin  prairies,  its  glistening  rivers,  its  un- 
tamed Indians,  its  explorers,  its  gray  and  black  cowls, 
its  coureurs  de  bois,  its  stars  whose  light  had  never 
before  looked  on  a  white  face;  and  second,  by  reason 
of  the  mass  of  incident  and  color  which  he  has  supplied 
for  the  background  of  the  life  I  have  known  in  that 
valley. 

On  entering  a  college  out  in  the  midst  of  that  region 
— the  middle  of  the  Mississippi  Valley — nearly  thirty 
years  ago  I  was  assigned,  as  my  first  important  task 
in  English,  the  reading  and  criticism  of  one  of  Park- 
man's  books.  I  think  that  "The  Oregon  Trail"  was 
suggested.  I  read  several  volumes,  however,  but  found 
my  interest  greatest  in  "The  Pioneers  of  France  in  the 
New  World"  and  "The  Jesuits  in  North  America." 
What  I  wrote  I  do  not  now  remember  (nor  do  I  wish 
to  refresh  my  memory),  but  so  persistent  was  the  grip 
of  those  graphic  relations  upon  my  imagination  that 
years  later,  when  leaving  the  presidency  of  that  same 
college,  I  asked  to  be  permitted  to  take  from  the  li- 
brary three  books  (replacing  them  with  fresher  copies) : 

401 


402     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

the  chapel  Bible — from  which  I  had  been  read  to  by  my 
president  and  professors  and  from  which  I  in  turn 
had  read  to  succeeding  students — a  copy  of  Spenser's 
"Faerie  Queene" — which  my  college's  only  poet, 
Eugene  Field,  had  read  through — and  a  volume  of 
Parkman's  on  the  pioneers  of  France. 

So  I  take  the  opportunity  to  pay  my  tribute  to  him 
who  long  ago  put  these  figures  on  the  frontier  of  my 
imagination,  and  who  has  prevented  my  ever  speaking 
in  dispassion  or  without  favorable  prejudice  of  them. 

When  Parkman  was  leaving  America  for  Paris  in 
1868,  "for  medical  advice  and  research,"  uncertain  as 
to  whether  he  would  ever  return  to  take  up  his  unfin- 
ished story  of  the  American  forest,  he  left  in  the  hands 
of  a  friend  a  parcel,  "not  to  be  opened  during  his  life." 
It  is  that  parcel,  not  opened  until  twenty-five  years 
later — for  Parkman  lived  to  return  to  America  and  to 
return  again  to  Paris  more  than  once,  and  then  to  go 
back  and  finish,  after  a  full  half-century  of  struggle 
with  physical  maladies  and  infirmities,  the  last  book  of 
the  plan  virtually  sketched  fifty  years  before,  and  with 
a  singular  felicity  of  coincidence  named  "The  Half- 
Century  of  Conflict" — it  is  that  parcel  which  has  kept 
for  later  generations  his  remarkable  autobiography. 

While  on  his  visits  in  Paris  he  was  known  in  a  wide 
circle.  As  he  himself  said  in  writing  to  his  sisters,  "if 
able  to  accept  invitations,"  he  "would  have  had  the 
run  of  Faubourg  St.  Germain."  I  doubt,  however,  if 
his  personality  is  remembered  by  many,  much  less 
that  strangely  tortured  life  which  probably  gave  little 
mark  of  its  suffering  even  to  those  who  knew  him  best 
in  France. 

I  therefore  recall  some  of  the  detail  of  the  years 


FRANCIS  PARKMAN  403 

preceding  those  days  when  he  appeared  in  the  streets 
of  Paris  seeking  health,  but  seeing  often  Margry,  the 
"intractable  yet  kindly  keeper"  of  an  important  de- 
partment of  French  archives,  who  had  in  his  secretive 
keeping  documents  most  precious  to  the  uses  of  Park- 
man. 

It  is  not  altogether  an  agreeable  chronicle,  this 
autobiography.1  It  is  rather  like  a  "pathological  re- 
cord," and  as  totally  unlike  the  pages  of  his  books  as 
can  be  well  imagined.  But  it  is  an  essential  docu- 
ment. 

The  first  pages  of  this  biography  were  withheld  by 
him  and  so  removed  from  the  parcel;  the  record  begins 
with  a  general  characterization  of  his  childhood.  There 
is  no  detail.  But  there  are  to  be  found  elsewhere  the 
memories  of  others  which  tell  of  his  boyish  enjoyment 
of  the  little  wilderness  of  joyous  colors  near  the  school 
to  which  he  was  sent — microcosm  of  the  greater  wilder- 
ness in  which  his  body  and  then  his  imagination  were 
to  wander  through  all  his  mature  days  till  his  death. 
His  own  chronicle  has  forgotten  or  ignored  those  elys- 
ian  days  and  has  not  in  all  its  length  a  joyful  note 
or  a  bright  color. 

This  is  the  summary:  His  childhood  was  neither 
healthful  nor  buoyant.  .  .  .  Chemical  experiment  was 
his  favorite  hobby,  involving  a  lonely,  confined,  un- 
wholesome sort  of  life,  baneful  to  body  and  mind.  .  .  . 
The  age  of  fifteen  or  sixteen  produced  a  revolution; 
retorts  and  crucibles  were  forever  discarded.  .  .  .  He 
became  enamoured  of  the  woods,  a  fancy  which  soon 
gained  full  control  over  the  course  of  his  literary  pur- 

1  Printed  in   "Proceedings  Massachusetts  Historical  Society,   1892-4," 
series  2,  8  :  349-360. 


404    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

suits.  .  .  .  He  resolved  to  confine  his  homage  to  the 
muse  of  history.  ...  At  the  age  of  eighteen  (born  in 
1823)  the  plan  (to  whose  execution  he  gave  his  long 
life)  was,  in  its  most  essential  features,  formed.  His 
idea  was  clear  before  him,  yet  attended  with  unpleas- 
ant doubts  as  to  his  ability  to  realize  it  to  his  own 
satisfaction.  .  .  .  The  task,  as  he  then  reckoned  it, 
would  require  about  twenty  years.  The  time  allowed 
was  ample;  but  here  he  fell  into  a  fatal  error,  entering 
upon  this  long  pilgrimage  with  all  the  vehemence  of 
one  starting  on  a  mile  heat.  His  reliance,  however, 
was  less  on  books  than  on  such  personal  experience  as 
should  intimately  identify  him  with  his  theme. 

Let  me  here  say  that  I  have  found  traces  of  his  steps 
at  nearly  every  site  that  I  have  visited.  He  had  been 
at  Fort  St.  Louis,  at  the  most  important  portages, 
and  at  the  places  where  the  French  forts  once  stood. 
His  natural  inclinations  urged  him  in  the  same  direc- 
tion, his  thoughts  were  constantly  in  the  forest,  whose 
features,  not  unmixed  with  softer  images,  possessed 
his  waking  and  sleeping  dreams;  he  was  as  fond  of 
hardships  as  he  was  vain  of  enduring  them,  cherishing 
a  sovereign  scorn  for  every  physical  weakness  or  de- 
fect. Moreover,  deceived  by  a  rapid  development  of 
frame  and  sinews  which  flattered  him  with  the  belief 
that  discipline  sufficiently  unsparing  would  harden 
him  into  an  athlete,  he  slighted  precautions  of  a  more 
reasonable  woodcraft,  tired  old  foresters  with  long 
marches,  stopped  neither  for  heat  nor  rain,  and  slept  on 
the  earth  without  a  blanket.  .  .  .  He  spent  his  sum- 
mer vacations  in  the  woods  or  in  Canada,  at  the  same 
time  reading  such  books  as  he  thought  suited  to  help 
him  toward  his  object.  .  .  .    While  in  the  law  school  he 


FRANCIS  PARKMAN  405 

entered  in  earnest  on  two  other  courses,  one  of  general 
history,  the  other  of  Indian  history  and  ethnology, 
studying  diligently  at  the  same  time  the  models  of 
English  style.  .  .  .  There  developed  in  him  a  state  of 
mental  tension,  habitual  for  several  years,  and  abun- 
dantly mischievous  in  its  effects.  With  a  mind  over- 
strained and  a  body  overtaxed,  he  was  burning  his 
candle  at  both  ends.  ...  A  highly  irritable  organism 
spurred  the  writer  to  excess.  .  .  .  Labor  became  a 
passion,  and  rest  intolerable  yet  with  a  keen  appetite 
for  social  enjoyments.  .  .  .  His  condition  became  that 
of  a  rider  whose  horse  runs  headlong  with  the  bit  be- 
tween his  teeth,  or  of  a  locomotive,  built  of  indifferent 
material,  under  a  head  of  steam  too  great  for  its 
strength,  hissing  at  a  score  of  crevices,  yet  rushing  on 
with  accelerating  speed  to  the  inevitable  smash.  .  .  . 
Soon  appeared,  as  a  sign  of  mischief,  weakness  of  sight. 
Accordingly  he  went  to  the  Rocky  Mountains  to  rest 
his  failing  vision  and  to  get  an  inside  view  of  Indian  life. 
.  .  .  Reeling  in  the  saddle,  he  set  forth,  attended 
by  a  Canadian  hunter.  .  .  .  Joining  the  Ogallala  In- 
dians, he  followed  their  wanderings  for  several  weeks. 
To  have  worn  the  air  of  an  invalid  would  have  been  an 
indiscretion,  as  he  says,  since  "a  horse,  a  rifle,  a  pair  of 
pistols,  and  a  red  shirt  might  have  offered  temptations 
too  strong  for  aboriginal  virtue."  So  he  hunted  when 
he  could  scarcely  sit  upright.  ...  To  the  maladies 
of  the  prairies  other  disorders  succeeded  on  his  return. 
.  .  .  Flat  stagnation  followed,  reaching  its  depth  in 
eighteen  months.  .  .  .  The  desire  to  return  to  the 
prairie  was  intense,  but  exposure  to  the  sunlight  would 
have  destroyed  his  sight.  .  .  .  When  his  condition 
was  at  its  worst,  he  resolved  to  attempt  the  composi- 


406    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

tion  of  the  "History  of  the  Conspiracy  of  Pontiac,"  for 
which  he  had  been  collecting  material  since  his  days  in 
college.  Suffering  from  extreme  weakness  of  sight,  a 
condition  of  the  brain  prohibiting  fixed  attention,  and 
a  nervous  derangement,  he  yet  set  out  upon  this  labor, 
using  a  wooden  frame  strung  with  parallel  wires  to 
guide  his  crayon.  Books  and  documents  were  read 
to  him,  but  never,  without  injury,  for  more  than  a 
half-hour  at  a  time,  and  frequently  not  at  all  for  days. 
For  the  first  half-year  he  averaged  six  lines  of  com- 
position a  day.  And  he  wrote,  I  suppose,  at  least  ten 
hundred  thousand  lines.  His  health  improving,  he 
dictated,  pacing  a  dark  garret.  He  then  entered  upon 
"France  in  the  New  World."  The  difficulties  were  in- 
calculable. .  .  .  Wholly  unable  to  use  his  eyes,  he 
had  before  him  the  task  of  tracing  out,  collecting,  in- 
dexing, arranging,  and  digesting  a  great  mass  of  in- 
congruous material,  scattered  on  both  sides  of  the 
Atlantic.  He  was  unable  to  employ  trained  assistants 
and  had  to  rely  mainly  on  his  own  research,  though, 
in  some  cases,  receiving  valuable  aid  of  scholars  and 
others.  He  used  to  employ  as  reader  of  French  a 
public-school  girl  wholly  ignorant  of  French  (who,  I 
suppose,  gave  English  pronunciation  to  all  the  words), 
but  with  such  help  and  that  of  members  of  his  own 
family  the  work  went  on.  Then  came  another  disaster 
— an  effusion  of  water  on  the  knee  which  involved  a 
close  confinement  for  two  years;  and  this  in  turn  re- 
sulted in  serious  nervous  disturbance  centring  in  the 
head.  These  extreme  conditions  of  disorder  continued 
for  many  years.  .  .  .  His  work  was  wholly  inter- 
rupted for  one  year,  four  years,  and  numerous  short 
intervals.  .  .  .     Later  the  condition  of  sight   so  far 


FRANCIS   PARKMAN  407 

improved  as  to  permit  reading,  not  exceeding,  on  an 
average,  five  minutes  at  one  time.  By  judicious  use 
this  modicum  of  power  was  extended.  By  reading  for 
one  minute  and  then  resting  for  an  equal  time  the 
alternate  process  could  be  continued  for  about  half  an 
hour,  then,  after  a  sufficient  interval,  repeated  three 
or  four  times  a  day.  Working  under  such  conditions 
he  makes  this  report,  1868,  of  progress:  "Most  of  the 
material  is  collected  or  within  reach;  another  volume, 
on  the  Jesuits  of  North  America,  is  one-third  written; 
another,  on  the  French  explorers  of  the  Great  West, 
is  half  written;  while  a  third,  devoted  to  the  checkered 
career  of  Comte  de  Frontenac,  is  partially  arranged  for 
composition."  During  this  period  he  had  made  many 
journeys  in  the  United  States  and  Canada  for  material, 
and  had  been  four  times  in  Europe.  .  .  .  He  wonders 
as  to  the  advantage  of  this  tortoise  pace,  but  says  in 
conclusion  that,  "irksome  as  may  be  the  requirements 
of  conditions  so  anomalous,  they  are  far  less  oppres- 
sive than  the  necessity  they  involve  of  being  busied 
with  the  Past  when  the  Present  has  claims  so  urgent, 
and  of  holding  the  pen  with  the  hand  that  should  have 
grasped  the  sword"  (for  he  was  greatly  disappointed 
that  he  could  not  enter  the  army  at  the  time  of  the 
Civil  War). 

I  have  made  this  rather  extensive  summary  of  the 
singular  autobiography — and  largely  in  the  author's 
own  words — not  to  prepare  your  minds  for  lenient 
judgments  of  his  work,  but  to  inform  them  of  the 
tenacious  purpose  of  the  man  whose  infirmities  of  the 
knees  kept  him  most  of  his  life  from  the  wild  forest 
trails  and  streams  and  compelled  him  to  a  wheel-chair 
in  gardens  of  tame  roses;  whose  weakness  of  the  eyes 


408     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

allowed  him  but  inadequate  vision  of  the  splendor  of 
the  woods  and  even  robbed  him  of  the  intimacy  of 
books;  whose  malady  of  mind  kept  him  ever  in  terror 
of  devils  more  fierce  than  the  inhuman  tortures  of 
Jogues  and  Brebeuf — a  tenacious  purpose  that  wrought 
its  youth-selected,  self-appointed  work,  and  so  well,  so 
splendidly,  so  thoroughly  that  it  needs  never  to  be 
done  again. 

One  of  his  friends,  in  a  memoir  of  Parkman,  recalls 
an  observation  of  Sainte-Beuve,  in  his  paper  on  Taine's 
"English  Literature,"  that  has  found  its  best  illustra- 
tion in  what  Parkman  accomplished  in  spite  of  lame- 
ness, blindness,  and  mental  distress:  "All  things  con- 
sidered, every  allowance  being  made  for  general  or 
particular  elements  and  for  circumstances,  there  still 
remain  place  and  space  enough  around  men  of  talent, 
wherein  they  can  move  and  turn  themselves  with  en- 
tire freedom.  And,  moreover,  were  the  circle  drawn 
round  each  a  very  contracted  one,  every  man  of  talent, 
every  genius,  in  so  far  as  he  is  in  some  degree  a  magi- 
cian and  an  enchanter,  possesses  a  secret  entirely  his 
own,  whereby  to  perform  prodigies  within  this  circle 
and  work  wonders  there."1 

This  autobiography  has  shown  how  short  was  the 
radius  of  the  circle.  The  twelve  volumes  of  his  work 
attest,  under  Sainte-Beuve's  definition,  the  degree  of 
his  powers  of  magic  and  enchantment.  Men  of  strong 
knees,  of  good  eyes,  and  of  brains  that  do  not  keep 
them  from  sleep  by  night  or  from  work  by  day,  have 
travelled  over  this  same  field,  but  of  most  that  they 
gathered  it  may  be  said:  "To  no  such  aureate  earth 
'tis  turned  as,  buried  once,  men  want  dug  up  again." 

'"Nouveaux  Lundis,"  vol.  VIII,  English  translation  in  "English  Por- 
traits," p.  243. 


FRANCIS  PARKMAN  409 

I  have  sat  for  days  in  the  Harvard  University  Library 
among  the  books  bequeathed  to  it  by  Parkman  (being 
the  greater  part  of  the  library  which  surrounded  him 
in  his  work — books  of  history,  of  travel,  and  of  biog- 
raphy; books  about  Indians,  flints,  and  folk-lore;  maps 
and  guides — among  them  several  guides  to  Paris — only 
twenty-five  hundred  volumes  in  all);  but  they  are  not 
the  material  of  his  magic.  His  work  was  not  legerde- 
main, skilful  manipulation,  but  recreation,  and  he 
found  the  aureate  earth  in  the  forests,  on  the  prairies, 
and  in  documents  contemporary  to  his  theme. 

In  a  cabinet  (bearing  in  its  carving  suggestions  of 
the  fleur-de-lis)  in  the  rooms  of  the  Massachusetts 
Historical  Society,  I  found  some  of  this  precious  ma- 
terial, also  bequeathed  by  the  historian.  Its  nature  is 
suggested  in  the  preface  to  his  "Montcalm  and  Wolfe." 
"A  very  large  amount,"  he  says,  "of  unpublished  ma- 
terial has  been  used  in  its  preparation,  consisting  for 
the  most  part  of  documents  copied  from  the  archives 
and  libraries  of  France  and  England.  The  papers 
copied  for  the  present  work  ["Montcalm  and  Wolfe"] 
in  France  alone,  exceed  six  thousand  folio  pages  of 
manuscript,  additional  and  supplementary  to  the 
'Paris  Documents'  procured  for  the  State  of  New  York. 
.  .  .  The  copies  made  in  England  form  ten  volumes, 
besides  many  English  documents  consulted  in  the 
original  manuscript.  Great  numbers  of  autograph 
letters,  diaries,  and  other  writings  of  persons  engaged 
in  the  war  have  also  been  examined  on  this  [i.  <?., 
American]  side  of  the  Atlantic." 

But  even  these  were  as  the  dry  bones  in  the  valley 
which  Ezekiel  saw,  till  he  touched  these  scattered  frag- 
ments with  his  genius. 


410    THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

The  process  employed  by  the  blind  workman  is 
described  by  Frothingham,  one  of  his  friends:  "The 
manuscripts  were  read  over  to  him,  slowly,  one  by  one. 
First  the  chief  points  were  considered,  then  the  details 
of  the  story  were  gone  over  carefully  and  minutely. 
As  the  reading  went  on,  he  made  notes,  first  of  essen- 
tial and  then  of  non-essential.  After  this  he  welded 
everything  together,  made  the  narrative  completely 
his  own,  infused  into  it  his  own  fire,  quickened  it  by 
his  own  imagination,  and  made  it  as  it  were  a  living 
experience,  so  that  his  books  read  like  personal  remi- 
niscences."1 

In  a  book  of  Parkman  memorabilia  of  various  kinds 
which  I  found  in  the  Harvard  Library,  I  happened  one 
day  upon  a  few  scraps  of  paper  which  furnish  illustra- 
tion of  the  first  steps  of  the  process — paper  on  which 
were  notes  made  in  Parkman's  own  hand: 

"Deserts  covered  with  bones  of  buffalo  and  elk"; 
"No  sign  of  man  from  Fort  Union  to  Fort  Mackenzie"; 
"White  clay,  cactus  dried  up,  grasshoppers";  "Pop- 
lars,— wild  roses, — gooseberries";  "prairie  dogs, — heat, 
— aridity";  "extraordinary  castellated  mountains, 
stone  walls, — etc.  above  Fort  Union";  "in  1832  Black- 
feet  are  said  to  have  killed  58  whites,  three  years  before, 
80";  "Blackfeet  do  not  eat  dogs — Blackfeet  Societies 
— beaver  traps  lent  to  Blackfeet";  "wood  near  Fort 
Clark  chiefly  poplar";  "fossils — terres  mauvaises"; 
"maize  cultivated  by  Mandans";  "catching  the  war 
eagle";  "Mandans  etc.  agricultural  tribes";  "wolf-pits 
described";  "Exceptional  cold  Ft.  Clark";  "Wolf  at- 
tacked three  women; — wooden  carts  no  iron";  "Barren 

1  "Memoirs  of  Francis  Parkman,"  in  "Proceedings  Massachusetts  His- 
torical Society,  1892-4,"  series  2,  8  :  555. 


FRANCIS   PARKMAN  411 

Mts.  little  dells  with  water, — gooseberries,  strawberries, 
currants,  very  few  trees,  mad  river." 

But  these  and  many  other  notes  on  scraps  of  blue 
paper  in  his  hand  have  significance  only  in  their  trans- 
lation, transfusion  into  the  color  or  detail  of  some  of 
his  wonderful  pictures.  Somewhere  in  his  books  I  felt 
certain,  when  reading  these  notes,  I  should  find  those 
poplars  growing  on  the  plains  with  wild  roses  and  goose- 
berry bushes  not  far  away;  some  day  I  should  come  to 
the  barren  mountains  and  the  dells  with  water,  or 
should  hear  the  roaring  of  the  mad  river  and  witness 
the  catching  of  the  war-eagle.  Indeed,  some  of  these 
very  notes  had  entered,  as  I  found,  into  the  description 
of  that  lonely  journey  of  the  brothers  Verendrye  as 
they  passed  through  the  bad  lands  (terres  mauvaises  of 
the  notes),  where  the  clay  is  sometimes  white  as  chalk 
and  the  barren,  castellated  bluffs,  "carved  into  fan- 
tastic shapes  by  the  storms,"  stand  about. 

"For  twenty  days  the  travellers  saw  no  human  being 
[see  note  above],  so  scanty  was  the  population  of  these 
plains.  Game,  however,  was  abundant.  Deer  sprang 
from  the  tall  reed  grass  of  the  river  bottoms;  buffalo 
tramped  by  in  ponderous  columns,  or  dotted  the  swells 
of  the  distant  prairie  with  their  grazing  thousands; 
antelope  approached,  with  the  curiosity  of  their  species, 
to  gaze  at  the  passing  horsemen,  then  fled  like  the  wind; 
and  as  they  neared  the  broken  uplands  towards  the 
Yellowstone,  they  saw  troops  of  elk  (later  their  bones) 
and  flocks  of  mountain-sheep.  Sometimes,  for  miles 
together,  the  dry  plain  was  studded  thick  with  the 
earthen  mounds  that  marked  the  burrows  of  the 
curious  marmots,  called  prairie  dogs  from  their  squeak- 
ing bark.     Wolves,  white  and  gray,  howled  about  the 


412     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

camp  at  night,  and  their  cousin,  the  coyote,  seated  in 
the  dusk  of  evening  upright  on  the  grass,  with  nose 
turned  to  the  sky,  saluted  them  with  a  complication  of 
yelpings,  as  if  a  score  of  petulant  voices  were  pouring 
together  from  the  throat  of  one  small  beast."1 

It  is  impossible  to  know  how  much  of  this  came 
from  his  own  actual  seeing  (for  in  his  journey  over 
the  Oregon  trail  he  had  passed  near  the  trail  of  the 
Verendrye  brothers)  and  how  much  came  from  those 
scraps  of  color  and  incident  picked  up  in  his  blindness 
from  varied  sources;  nor  is  it  of  consequence,  except  as 
it  connotes  something  of  the  quality  and  character  of 
his  genius,  for  it  is  all  accurate  and  the  brave  brothers 
Verendrye  move  as  living  men  across  it.  He  was  able 
to  revivify  a  dusty  document  as  well  as  a  personal  ex- 
perience. "To  him,"  as  Mr.  Barrett  Wendell  said  out 
of  an  intimate  acquaintance  with  him  and  his  work, 
"a  document  of  whatever  kind, — a  state  paper,  a 
Jesuit  'relation,'  the  diary  of  a  provincial  soldier,  the 
record  of  a  Yankee  church, — was  merely  the  symbol  of 
a  fact  which  had  once  been  as  real  as  his  own  hardships 
among  the  western  Indians,  or  as  the  lifetime  of  phys- 
ical suffering,  which  never  bent  his  will."2  I  have 
never  read  "The  Oregon  Trail"  with  the  same  keen 
enthusiasm  as  his  other  books,  largely,  I  think,  because 
it  is  a  mere  report  of  personal  adventure  and  not  a 
composition  fused  of  his  imagination.  It  is  an  excellent 
photograph  by  the  side  of  a  master's  painting. 

But  all  this  accuracy  of  detail,  this  revivifying  of 
dead  Indians,  knights,  voyageurs  and  soldiers,  this 
painting  of  prairie,  forest,  and  mountain,  was  not  in 

1  Parkman,  "  Half  -Century  of  Conflict,"  2  :  23,  24. 
2 "  Proceedings    American    Academy    of    Arts    and    Sciences,    1893-4," 
29  :  439. 


FRANCIS   PARKMAN  413 

itself  to  put  him  among  the  world's  great  historians. 
And,  indeed,  there  are  those  who,  appreciating  the 
artist's  skill,  have  expressed  regret  that  he  gave  this 
skill  to  no  great  theme.  It  is  as  if  he  were  (they 
would  doubtless  say)  writing  of  the  labors  of  sacrificing 
missionaries  in  Africa,  or  of  colonial  administration  in 
Indo-China,  or  of  forest  adventure  along  the  Amazon. 
In  the  Boston  Public  Library  I  found  that  every  work 
of  his  had  duplicate  copies  in  the  boys'  department. 
(And  how  great  the  reading  is  to  this  day  is  intimated 
by  my  inability  one  evening  to  get  a  copy  of  "Pontiac's 
War,"  though  there  were  several  copies  in  the  posses- 
sion of  the  library.  A  reserve  had  finally  to  be  called 
in.)  But  I  should  say  that  this  double  classification 
intimated  rather  the  genuine  human  interest  of  his 
story,  appealing  alike  to  men  and  to  boys  (as  the  great- 
est of  human  writings  do) — a  work  "for  all  mankind 
and  for  all  time." 

But  I  should  go  beyond  this.  His  books  are  not 
merely  of  elemental  entertainment.  He  has  seized  the 
most  fundamental,  far-reaching,  and  consequential  of 
themes.  He  found  going  on  in  his  forest,  of  which  he 
set  out  to  write,  not  merely  flame-lighted  scalpings  and 
official  rapacities  and  picturesque  maraudings  and 
quixotic  pageants  and  the  like.  His  theme  was  even 
greater  than  the  mere  gathering  of  all  these  raids  and 
rapacities  and  maraudings  and  pageants  into  an  in- 
formed racial,  national  struggle  for  the  possession  of  a 
continent.  It  was  nothing  less  than  the  grappling,  out 
on  the  frontier  of  the  world,  between  two  principles  of 
organized  human  life.  The  forests  are  so  demanding, 
the  incidents  so  stirring  in  themselves,  that  many  have 
doubtless  missed  the  high  theme  that  expressed  it- 


4H  THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

self  there.  But  that  theme  possessed  its  author,  and 
it  possesses  every  sensitive  reader  as  some  fateful,  re- 
curring, tragic  melody  in  an  opera  full  of  diverting  in- 
cident and  picturesque  figures. 

Parkman  is  more  likely  to  keep  his  generalizations 
within  the  overture,  but  frequently  one  gives  summary 
to  an  act  or  scene,  so  that  even  he  who  comes  for  en- 
tertainment can  hardly  miss  the  significance  of  it  all; 
though,  as  Mr.  Wendell  has  said,  to  borrow  again  from 
his,  the  best,  brief  tribute:  "Parkman  was  very  spar- 
ing of  generalization,  of  philosophic  comment,"  whether 
from  overconsciousness  or  from  the  intrusion  of  his 
malady  which  forbade  long-continued  thought.  He 
made  the  course  of  events  carry  its  own  philosophy. 

Several  noble  and  notable  generalizations  have,  how- 
ever, already  thrust  themselves  into  these  chapters  to  il- 
lustrate his  appreciation  of  the  loftiness  of  his  theme, 
his  candor,  and  his  genuine  sympathy  with  those  to 
whose  ill-fated  heroism  he  gave  such  "precious  testi- 
mony." 

One  has  only  to  associate  with  the  persistent,  clearly 
outlined  purpose  of  a  half-century  a  realization  of  the 
completeness  of  its  achievement  to  be  stirred,  as  by 
the  victory  not  of  a  fortuitously  reckless  assault  but 
of  a  long,  carefully  planned  campaign. 

Among  his  papers  (in  the  fleur-de-lis  cabinet  of 
which  I  have  spoken)  there  are  the  first  prophecies: 
two  maps  of  the  Lake  George  (Champlain)  region 
drawn  by  him  on  the  inside  of  a  red  portfolio  cover, 
marked  1842,  when  he  was  nineteen  years  old;  and 
next  an  odd-covered  blank  book  in  which  he  began 
his  note-making  on  the  "Old  French  War,"  with  such 
notes  as  these:  "Rights  of  the  two  nations";  "When 


FRANCIS   PARKMAN  415 

did  Marquette  make  his  discoveries?"  "When  did  La 
Salle  settle?"  "Had  not  the  French  a  right  both  of 
prior  discovery  and  prior  settlement?"  "The  English 
never  settled";  "The  letters  patent  to  Louisiana  are 
preposterous,  perhaps,  but  not  more  so  than  the  Eng- 
lish claim  from  coasts  back  of  the  Mississippi";  "The 
first  blood  was  spilt  by  Washington.  Jumonville  would 
seem  to  have  been  sent  with  peaceful  intentions.  His 
orders  charged  him  to  attack  the  French." 

The  title  is  written  in  a  strong  hand,  but  before  he 
has  half  filled  the  little  book  he  makes  entry  that  the 
"French  War"  is  laid  aside,  for  the  time,  for  the  his- 
tory of  "Pontiac's  War,"  and  thus  the  latter  part  of 
this  thin  note-book  grew  into  "The  Conspiracy  of 
Pontiac,"  and  that  in  turn  became  sequel  to  the  whole 
series  of  which  it  also  was  the  promise,  a  series  of  books 
so  closely  related  that  John  Fiske  speaks  of  them  as 
"one  book." 

The  scope,  to  be  sure,  is  a  restricted  one.  He  has 
two  great  wildernesses  to  cover,  but  it  is  a  century 
and  a  half  after  the  epic  narrative  begins  before  enough 
people  enter  to  prevent  one  from  keeping  track  of  all  of 
them.  It  is  as  if  he  were  writing  the  history  of  man, 
from  the  last  day  of  creation  forward,  starting  with  a 
few  transmigrant  souls  still  under  the  control  of  their 
oversea  existence.  He  begins  at  the  beginning,  with 
not  even  a  twilight  zone  of  tradition  and  with  a  stage 
"far  more  primitive  than  that  which  is  depicted  in  the 
Odyssey  or  even  Genesis."  Cartier's  route  is  as  well 
known  as  that  of  the  steamship  that  sailed  yesterday 
through  the  "Square  Gulf,"  if  the  ice  permitted,  and 
the  incidents  of  his  first  days  beyond  the  gates  of  the 
first  wilderness  have  been  as  accurately  recorded,  to 


416     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

say  the  least,  as  are  yesterday's  events  yonder  in  the 
morning's  papers  here.  And  when  his  story  ends,  there 
are  not  as  many  people  in  the  two  great  valleys  along 
the  St.  Lawrence  and  the  Mississippi  as  in  a  good-sized 
city  to-day.  But  none  the  less,  as  I  have  said,  are  the 
forces  (fighting  in  and  through  these  few  representatives 
of  civilization)  age-old  and  world-important.  Never 
has  historian  had  such  fascinating  theme — such  "epic 
theme,"  says  Fiske — "save  when  Herodotus  told  the 
story  of  Greece  and  Persia,  or  when  Gibbon's  pages  re- 
sounded with  the  marshalled  hosts  through  a  thousand 
years  of  change."  And  Parkman  met  one  of  what 
Lowell  calls  "the  convincing  tests  of  genius"  in  the 
choice  of  this  subject. 

When  John  Fiske  said  at  the  Harvard  exercises  in 
memory  of  Parkman  that  he  was  one  of  the  world's 
greatest  historians,  I  subtracted  something  because  of 
the  occasion  and  the  nearness  of  view.  But  a  year 
later  he  is  saying  of  Parkman's  work,  in  a  critical  re- 
view: "Strong  in  its  individuality  and  like  to  nothing 
besides,  it  clearly  belongs,  I  think,  among  the  world's 
few  masterpieces  of  the  highest  rank,  along  with  the 
works  of  Herodotus,  Thucydides,  and  Gibbon."1 

There  will  never  be  such  a  story  to  write  again,  for 
the  frontier  of  forest  and  prairie  has  disappeared.  It 
is  now  in  the  midst  of  cities  where  civilizations  grapple 
in  their  smoke  and  turmoil.  So  shall  we  hold  even 
more  precious  his  gift  and  thank  Heaven  for  "sending 
us  such  a  scholar,  such  an  artist,  such  a  genius  before 
it  was  too  late  to  catch  the  fleeting  light  and  fix  it 
upon  immortal  canvas." 

1  Atlantic  Monthly,  73  :  674;  "A  Century  of  Science  and  Other  Essays," 
p.  264. 


FRANCIS   PARKMAN  417 

Among  the  writings  of  Francis  Parkman  there  are  a 
few  pages — known  not  even  to  a  score  of  his  readers,  I 
suppose — which  might  very  well  be  printed  in  summary 
of  his  great  work — though  they  find  no  place  in  any 
volume — for  the  symbol  they  carry  of  his  achievement. 
These  few  pages  make  a  leaflet — a  reprint  of  a  paper 
contributed  to  the  Botanical  Bulletin  in  1878  by 
"Francis  Parkman,  late  Professor  of  Horticulture  at 
the  Bussey  Institution,"  and  entitled  "The  Hybridi- 
zation of  Lilies."  In  this  brief  paper  is  related  the 
story  of  Parkman's  own  attempts,  extending  through 
seven  years,  to  combine  certain  well-established  vari- 
eties of  lilies,  and  especially  two  superb  lilies — the 
"Speciosum"  (Lancifolium)  and  the  "Auratum," — the 
pollen  of  the  latter  being  carried  to  the  deanthered 
flowers  of  the  former.  The  patient,  anxious,  exquisite 
care  with  which  he  carried  on  these  experiments  sug- 
gests the  infinite  pains  with  which  he  gathered  and 
classified  and  sifted  and  weighed  his  historical  material 
(his  material  of  "France  Speciosum"  and  of  "France 
Auratum").  The  result  of  his  floral  experiment,  the 
wonderfully  beautiful  flower  which  he  produced,  de- 
scribed in  a  London  horticultural  magazine  as  the 
"grandest  flowering  plant  yet  introduced  into  our 
gardens,"  and  known  as  the  "Lilium  Parkmanni,"  is 
suggestive  of  his  achievement  in  so  depicting  and  defin- 
ing that  civilization  which  is  symbolized  by  the  lily, 
the  fleur-de-lis,  in  its  strange,  wild,  highly  colored 
flowering  on  the  prairies  and  by  the  rivers  of  Nouvelle 
France,  as  to  make  it  for  all  time  identified  with  his 
memory  and  name.  He  lived  among  roses  of  his  own 
growing,  through  his  later  invalid  years,  in  the  out- 
skirts of  Boston.    He  even  wrote  a  book  about  roses. 


418     THE  FRENCH  IN  THE  HEART  OF  AMERICA 

But  his  peculiar  triumph  (the  one  flower  that  lingers  in 
gardens  carrying  a  memory  of  him)  is  a  "magnificent" 
lily.  And  though  he  lived  amid  the  heritages  of  the 
English,  in  the  new  continent,  with  fair  mind  and  most 
acute  and  industrious,  he  has  preserved  the  hybrid 
heritages  of  the  French  spirit  in  the  American  regions 
— heritages  that,  save  for  his  research  lighted  by 
imagination,  might  never  have  blossomed  in  the  pages 
of  history. 


INDEX 


Addams,  Jane,  268;  "Spirit  of  Youth 

and  the  City  Streets,"  356. 
Aeroplanes,  208. 
Agricultural  colleges,  342-345. 
Agricultural     experiment     stations, 

342-345- 

Agricultural  extension,  342-345. 

Agricultural  machinery,  importance 
of,  334-341;  saving  effected  by, 
338-340;  affects  size  of  farms,  340- 
341. 

Allouez,  Claude  Jean,  Jesuit  priest, 
37;  at  Ste.  Marie,  48;  oration  at 
Ottawa  council,  51-54. 

America,  origin  of  name,  391-392. 

Andre,  Louis,  Jesuit  priest,  at  Ste. 
Marie  mission,  48. 

Animals,  first  road-makers,  174-175. 

"Aramoni,"  a  typical  western  town, 
184-185. 

Aramoni  River,  183. 

Architecture  of  Mississippi  Valley, 
86-88. 

Arnold,  Bion  J.,  on  future  popula- 
tion of  Chicago,  265. 

Art,  lack  of  appreciation  of,  in  Mis- 
sissippi Valley,  333. 

Artaguette,  Pierre  d',  French  officer, 
89;  murdered  by  Chickasaws,  115. 

Arthur,  Chester  A.,  298. 

Aubert,  Thomas,  navigator,  may 
have  discovered  Gulf  of  St.  Law- 
rence, 6. 

Aubry  (Captain),  expedition  to  re- 
lieve Fort  Niagara,  117. 

Aubry,  Nicolas,  secular  priest,  lost 
in  Acadian  forest,  16. 

Bancroft,  George,  "History  of  the 
United  States"  cited,  104-105, 
119. 


Baseball,  242,  333. 

Baxter,  James  Phinney,  historian, 
"Jacques  Carrier"  cited,  11,  12. 

Beaumarchais,  assumed  name  of 
Pierre  Augustin  Caron,  320-321. 

Beaver,  378. 

Benton,  Thomas  H.,  senator, 
speech  on  a  bill  for  the  construc- 
tion of  a  highway  to  the  Pacific 
cited,  174. 

Berthelot,  Pierre  Eugene  Marcellin, 

342- 

Bessemer,  Henry,  inventor,  347-348; 
experiments  in  iron  manufacture, 
348;  paper  before  the  British  Asso- 
ciation, 348;  invents  Bessemer 
converter,  348. 

Bienville,  Jean  Baptiste  le  Moyne, 
Sieur  de,  106,  108,  394;  founds 
New  Orleans,  no. 

Big  Horn  Mountains,  discovered  by 
La  Verendrye  brothers,  113. 

Birkbeck,  Morris,  "Notes  on  a 
Tour  in  America,    18 17,"   cited, 

139- 
Bismarck-Schonhausen,    Otto    Ed- 
uard  von,  his  definition  of  a  state, 

3°S- 

Bison,  Hennepin  pictures,  61;  La 
Galissonniere  describes  importance 
as  domestic  animal,  116;  paths 
made  by,  174;  disappearance  of, 
378. 

Boll-weevil,  control  of,  303. 

Bonnecamps,  Joseph  Pierre  de,  Jes- 
uit, his  diary  of  Celoron's  expedi- 
tion, 223;  his  map,  223. 

Book  of  Wisdom  quoted,  331-33  2. 

Boone,  Daniel,  133,  315. 

Boston,  Massachusetts,  in  1732, 
314. 


419 


420 


INDEX 


Brebeuf,  Jean  de,  Jesuit  priest,  393; 

among  Hurons,  32;  tortured  by 

Iroquois,  32;  dies,  33. 
Bressani,  Francesco  Gioseppe,  Jesuit 

priest,  31. 
Brouage     (France),    birthplace    of 

Champlain,  14. 
Brule,  Etienne,  explorer,  179,  180, 

310. 
Bryce,  James,  "American  Common- 
wealth" cited,  138;  on  American 

humor,  285-286. 
Buffalo,  see  Bison. 
Buffalo,  New  York,  216. 
Burke,  W.,  "Remarks  on  the  Letter 

Addressed  to  Two  Great  Men" 

cited,  119. 

Cabeca  de  Vaca,  Spanish  soldier,  73. 
Cabot,  John  and  Sebastian,  naviga- 
tors, 5. 
Cadillac,  Antoine  de  la  Mothe,  gov- 
ernor of  Louisiana,  1 10. 
Cadmus,  216. 

Cahokia,  Illinois  village,  88. 
Canals,  387. 
Canals,  Canadian,  214. 
Carlyle,  Thomas,|388. 
Carnegie,     Andrew,     235-236;    his 

charities,  236. 
Cartier,  Jacques,   French  explorer, 
309,  392;  explores  St.  Lawrence 
River,  4-13. 
First  voyage,  1534. 

Seeks  a  way  to  China,  6;  re- 
turns to  St.  Malo,  6;  ex- 
plores Gulf  of  St.  Lawrence, 
6. 
Second  voyage,  1535. 
Explores  St.  Lawrence  River, 
6;    sights    Quebec,    7;    at 
Hochelaga   (Montreal),   7; 
builds  fort  at  Quebec,  10; 
returns  to  France,  II. 
Third  voyage,  1 541,  12. 
Supposed  fourth  voyage,  1543, 

13- 
Celoron,  Pierre  Joseph,  French  ex- 


plorer, Ohio  expedition,  217-224, 
317;  addresses  Indians,  223-224. 
Champlain,  Samuel,  explorations, 
14-22,  392;  born  at  Brouage,  14; 
voyage  to  West  Indies,  1 599-1601, 
15;  explores  St.  Lawrence,  1603, 
15;  explores  Atlantic  coast,  1604, 
16,  311;  settles  in  Acadia,  1604, 
16;  in  Paris,  1607-1608,  20;  voyage 
of  1608,  20;  founds  Quebec,  20; 
first  expedition  against  Iroquois, 
1609,  20;  discovers  Lake  Cham- 
plain, 1609,  20;  founds  Montreal, 
161 1,  21;  surrenders  to  English, 
1629,  22;  re-establishes  his  colony, 
1633,  22;  hears  of  Mississippi 
River  from  Nicolet,  24;  predicts 
Panama  Canal,  15,  97;  dies,  1635, 
22. 

Charlevoix,  Pierre  Francois  Xavier, 

254- 

Chartres,  Fort,  88;  importance  of, 
115;  fortified  by  Macarty,  116; 
refuses  to  surrender  to  English, 
117;  St.  Ange  resumes  command, 
130;  Captain  Pittman  on,  118; 
Mississippi  River  inundates,  118. 

Chateaubriand,  Francois  Auguste, 
on  Mississippi  Valley,  84-85,  175- 
176;  "Travels  in  America  and 
Italy"  cited,  85,  156;  "Atala" 
cited,  175-176. 

Chautauqua  Assembly,  332. 

Chesterton,  Gilbert  K.,  on  democ- 
racy, 304;  his  "Heretics"  quoted, 

304,  357,  4°°- 
Chicago,  260;  early  history,  262-263; 
school  lands,  263;  city  plan,  264- 
268;  future  population,  264-265; 
World's  Columbian  Exposition, 
265-266;  municipal  enterprises, 
265;  rapid  growth,  266;  Harriet 
Martineau  on,  266;  civic  spirit, 
267;  lake  front,  268;  traction  sys- 
tem, 268;  park  system,  268;  ar- 
rangement of  streets,  268;  civic 
centres,  268;  H.  G.  Wells  on,  337; 
schools,  363. 


INDEX 


421 


Chicago  drainage  canal,  212;  see  also 
Lakes-to-gulf  waterway. 

Chicago  railroad  strike,  1894,  351. 

Chickasaw  Indians,  murder  d'Arta- 
guette,  115. 

Child  labor,  303. 

Chimney-sweeping,  regulation  of,  in 
New  France,  293. 

Chiropody,  regulation  of,  303. 

Choiseul,  Etienne-Francois,  Due  de, 
119;  cedes  Louisiana  to  England 
and  Spain,  121,  157. 

Cities,  suburbanization  of,  191;  of 
Mississippi  Valley,  216-269;  mi- 
gration  to,  190-193;  regulation  of, 
in  New  France,  293;  social  condi- 
tion, Whitman  on,  240;  improve- 
ment of,  243-245 ;  growth  of,  244. 

City  planning,  Pittsburgh,  237-239; 
Chicago,  264-268. 

Civil  service,  growth  of,  303-304. 

Clark,  Champ,  congressman,  188. 

Clark,  Captain  George  Rogers,  157. 

Coal  lands,  withdrawn  from  private 
entry,  386. 

Coal  resources  of  Mississippi  Valley, 
exhaustion,  375;  conservation  of, 
380. 

Commons,  John  R.,  "Wage  Earners 
of  Pittsburg"  cited,  232-233. 

Confederation  of  English  colonies, 
caused  by  French  War,  1 19-120, 
396. 

Conservation,  371-390,  399;  public 
interest  in,  383;  National  Conser- 
vation Commission,  384;  National 
Conservation  Congress,  385;  dec- 
laration of  principles,  386. 

Constitutional  Convention,  1787, 
movement  for,  indirectly  started 
by  Washington,  326. 

Conti,  Prince  de,  La  Salle  has  inter- 
view with,  103. 

Corn,  production  of,  in  Mississippi 
Valley,  339. 

"Cosmographia;  Introductio,"  1507, 

39i- 
Cotton,  339. 


Country  life,  34S"347- 
Country  life  commission,  346. 
County    agricultural    agents,    343- 

345- 

Coureurs  de  bois,  170-180;  see  also 
Nicolas  Perrot,  Etienne  Brule, 
Jean  Nicollet,  Daniel  du  Lhut. 

Cowboys,  Paul  Fountain  on,  84. 

Crevecceur,  Fort,  built  by  La  Salle, 
64,  76;  destroyed  by  Iroquois,  66. 

Crickets,  control  of,  303. 

Croly,  Herbert,  "Promise  of  Amer- 
ican Life"  quoted,  279. 

Crozat,  Antoine,  Louisiana  given 
to,  iio-iii. 

Cutler,  Rev.  Manasseh,  161. 

Dablon,  Claude,  Jesuit  priest,  37, 
249;  at  Ste.  Marie,  48-49. 

Dauphin  Island,  no. 

Dayton  Flood  Commission,  95. 

Deforestation,  95. 

Democracy,  G.  K.  Chesterton  on, 
304. 

Democracy  of  Mississippi  Valley, 
291-308,  398;  result  of  land  policy, 
295. 

Democratic  government,  made  pos- 
sible by  railroads,  193-194. 

Denatured  alcohol,  346. 

Dentistry,  regulation  of,  303. 

Denys,  Jean,  French  navigator,  may 
have  entered  Gulf  of  St.  Law- 
rence, 6. 

De  Quincey,  Thomas,  "Flight  of  a 
Tartar  Tribe"  cited,  135, 147-148. 

De  Soto,  Fernando,  Spanish  ex- 
plorer, 68,  71,  73. 

De  Tocqueville,  see  Tocqueville. 

Detroit,  130,  216. 

Detroit  River,  commerce,  207. 

Dinwiddie,  Robert,  governor  of  Vir- 
ginia, sends  Washington  to  Fort 
Le  Bceuf,  225. 

Direct  primary,  194. 

D'Olbeau,  Jean,  see  Olbeau,  Jean  d\ 

Dollier  du  Casson,  Francois,  "His- 
toire  du  Montreal"  cited,  9. 


422 


INDEX 


Donnacona,  Indian  chief,  7;  taken 
to  France,  11;  presented  to  King 
Francis,  11;  dies,  II. 

Druilletes,  Gabriel,  Jesuit  priest,  at 
Boston,  37;  at  Ste.  Marie,  48. 

Dry  farming,  342-345. 

Du  Lhut,  Daniel  Greysolon,  ex- 
plorer, 181,  209. 

Duluth,  Minn.,  181;  commerce,  209. 

Du  Plessis,  Pacificus,  Recollet 
brother,  26. 

Duquesne,  Fort,  242;  built,  225. 

Du  Tisne,  Claude  Charles,  explores 
Missouri  River,  113. 

Eads,  General  James  Buchanan,  en- 
gineer, 94. 

Education,  provisions  of  Northwest 
Ordinance,  160;  land  grants  for, 
160-164;  m  Mississippi  Valley, 
162-167,  354-370,  398-399;  hi 
New  York  City,  241 ;  in  Iowa,  356- 
357;  function  of,  in  democracy, 
354-369;  social  value  of,  368-370; 
origin  of  American  system,  370; 
see  also  Schools,  Universities. 

Eliot,  Charles  W.,  384. 

Emancipation  Proclamation,  277. 

Embalming,  303. 

Employers'  liability,  303. 

English  colonists,  covet  western 
country,  60,  106,  109;  united  by 
French  War,  1 19-120;  indepen- 
dence of,  made  possible  by  French, 
I 19-120. 

Epileptics,  care  of,  303 . 

Erie,  Lake,  discovered  by  Joliet,  57. 

Erie,  Pa.,  216,  226. 

Erie  Canal,  213-214;  its  influence  on 
western  society,  146. 

Espiritu  Santo,  Rio  del,  see  Mobile 
River. 

Evans,  George  Henry,  agitation  for 
land  reform,  169. 

Farm  demonstrators,  344-345. 
Farmers'  institutes,  345. 


Farmers  of  Mississippi  Valley,  338- 
341- 

Farms  of  Mississippi  Valley,  338- 
341;  machinery  on,  338-340;  size 
of,  340;  crops,  341. 

Finley,  John,  explores  Kentucky, 
132-133. 

Fire  control,  303. 

Fish,  predatory,  303. 

Fiske,  John,  "New  France  and  New 
England"  cited,  104;  on  Parkman, 
416. 

Floods,  92-95,  379. 

Forest,  aboriginal,  Chateaubriand 
describes,  175-176,  178;  influence 
on  man,  179. 

Forest  fires,  389. 

Forest  legislation,  387. 

Forest  parks,  387. 

Forest  reserves,  167,  168,  387. 

Forests,  exhaustion,  377;  conserva- 
tion, 381-382. 

Fountain,  Paul,  "Great  Deserts  and 
Forests  of  North  America"  quoted, 
83-84. 

Franklin,  Benjamin,  321;  advises  ac- 
quisition of  New  France,  120. 

Free-Soil  party,  168. 

French  and  Indian  War,  117-119, 

129,  3I7-320- 

French  Canadians,  196,  371,  394. 

French  settlers  in  Louisiana,  130- 
131;  Continental  Congress  allots 
land  to,  130;  intermarry  with  In- 
dians, 131. 

Frontenac,  orders  exploration  of 
Mississippi  River,  38. 

Frontiersmen,  English,  132-149,  314. 

Fulton,  Robert,  192. 

Gale,  Zona,  250-252;  her  "Friend- 
ship Village,"  250-251;  on  village 
improvement,  252;  "Friendship 
Village  Love  Stories"  quoted, 
252. 

Galesburg,  111.,  307. 

Game  laws,  303. 

Garay,  Francisco  de,  73. 


INDEX 


423 


Garfield,  James  G.,  298. 

Garland,  Hamlin,  "Silent  Missis- 
sippi" quoted,  86;  on  Mississippi 
River,  85-87. 

Gamier,  Charles,  Jesuit,  31,  393; 
tortured  to  death  by  Iroquois,  33. 

Gary,  Indiana,  349. 

George  III,  king  of  England,  for- 
bids colonization  of  western  coun- 
try, 128. 

Gorges,  Sir  Ferdinando,  explorer, 
152. 

Gospel  lands,  161. 

Grain,  commerce  in,  on  Great  Lakes, 
210. 

Grant,  Ulysses  S.,  298. 

Grasshoppers,  control  of,  303. 

Great  Lakes,  extent,  206;  commerce, 
54,  195-215;  tonnage,  207;  har- 
bor improvement,  207. 

Greeley,  Horace,  journalist,  on  land 
policy,  171. 

Griffin,  ship,  393;  built  by  La  Salle, 
56,  62,  198-203;  launched,  203; 
on  Lake  St.  Clair,  204;  in  Green 
Bay,  205;  lost,  62,  205-206,  210. 

Groseilliers,  Medard  Chouart,  Sieur 
de,  394;  explores  northern  Mis- 
sissippi River  with  Radisson,  26, 
249. 

Guadeloupe,  cession  of,  to  England, 
instead  of  New  France,  proposed, 
120. 

Gulf  ports,  increasing  importance  of, 
187. 

Gulf  Stream,  79. 

Harbor  improvement,  Great  Lakes, 

207;  in  France,  207. 
Harrison,  Benjamin,  298. 
Hart,   Albert   B.,    "Future  of  the 

Mississippi  Valley"  cited,  80. 
Harvester,  invented  by  McCormick, 

334-336;  importance  of,  336-341; 

manufacture  of,  at  Chicago,  336- 

337- 
Hayes,  Rutherford  B.,  298. 
Hazing,  303. 


Hennepin,  Louis,  Recollet  friar,  394; 
accompanies  La  Salle's  expedition, 
198-205,  208;  at  Fort  Frontenac, 
199;  embarks  for  Niagara  River, 
199;  describes  Niagara  Falls,  61, 
200;  explores  upper  Mississippi, 
64-65;  captured  by  Sioux,  65. 

Highway  grants,  167. 

Hill,  James  J.,  "Highways  of  Prog- 
ress" cited,  182,  185;  on  impor- 
tance of  railroad  in  development 
of  Mississippi  Valley,  182-185. 

Homestead  grants,  167,  168. 

Homestead  movement,  social  as- 
pects, 168-173;  ends  slavery  in 
United  States,  170;  exhausts  pub- 
lic domain,  170;  effects  settlement 
of  west,  172. 

Homogeneity,  social,  railroad  pro- 
motes, 193. 

Horse-raising,  regulation  of,  in  New 
France,  293. 

Hosmer,  James  K.,  "  Short  History  of 
the  Mississippi  Valley"  cited,  105. 

Huguenots,  desire  to  settle  in  Loui- 
siana, 107-108,  220. 

Hulbert,  Archer  Butler,  313;  "His- 
toric Highways"  cited,  177. 

Humor,  American,  285-286. 

Huron,  Lake,  discovered  by  Etienne 
Brule,  1615,  21. 

Iberville,  Pierre  le  Moyne,  Sieur  d', 
394;  colonizes  Louisiana,  106-109. 

Idiots,  care  of,  303. 

Illinois  country,  described  by  Mar- 
quette, 42-43;  La  Salle  plans  col- 
ony  in,    100-101;   prosperity  of, 

."S.- 
Illinois   Indians,  invite   Marquette 

to  preach  among  them,  38;  wel- 
come Marquette  and  Joliet,  41. 

Illinois  River,  76. 

Immigration,  European,  to  Missis- 
sippi Valley,  146-147. 

Indian  grants,  167. 

Indian  reservations,  167. 

Indian  trails,  174. 


424 


INDEX 


Indians,  government  treatment  of, 
372. 

Initiative  and  referendum,  194. 

Insane,  care  of,  303. 

Iowa,  school  lands,  164;  education 
in,  35&-357- 

Iron,  commerce  in,  on  Great  Lakes, 
209;  Bessemer  process  of  manufac- 
ture, 347-348. 

Iron  and  steel  industry,  347-350; 
in  Pittsburgh,  230-234;  steel-work- 
ers, 233-235. 

Iron  resources  of  Mississippi  Valley, 
exhaustion  of,  376-377;  conser- 
vation of,  381. 

Iroquois,  Champlain's  expedition 
against,  1609,  20;  raid  Illinois 
country,  66. 

Isle  aux  Galets,  395. 

Jackson,  Andrew,  299. 

Jamay,  Denis,  Recollet  friar,  26. 

James,  Henry,  400. 

James,  William,  "Moral  Equivalent 
of  War"  cited,  390. 

Jason,  197. 

"Jesuit  Relations,"  29-30;  value  as 
historical  records,  30;  conditions 
under  which  written,  30;  Thwaites 
cited  on  characteristics  of,  30. 

Jesuits,  in  New  France,  27-45. 

Jogues,  Isaac,  Jesuit  priest,  310,  393; 
captured  by  Iroquois,  34;  at  Lake 
George,  34;  tortured,  34;  escapes 
to  Fort  Orange,  35;  in  France,  36; 
granted  dispensation  by  Pope 
Urban  VIII,  36-37;  tortured  to 
death  by  Iroquois,  37. 

Johnson,  Andrew,  on  public  lands, 
153—154,  172;  speech  on  home- 
stead bill  cited,  154. 

Joliet,  Louis,  explorer,  explores  Mis- 
sissippi River  with  Marquette,  38- 
44,  73~74>  249;  at  Illinois  village, 
41;  reaches  mouth  of  Arkansas 
River,  42;  on  Illinois  River,  42; 
announces  discovery  of  Mississippi 
River  to  Frontenac,  43;  loses  rec- 


ords in  Lachine  Rapids,  43 ;  at  Ste. 
Marie,  49;  proposes  lakes-to-gulf 
waterway,  96,  260;  on  Illinois 
country,  261-262;  memorial  cross 
erected  to  memory  of,  259. 

Jonas,  ship,  voyages  to  Acadia,  16. 

Joutel,  Henri,  109. 

Juchereau  de  St.  Denis,  Louis,  ex- 
plores Red  River,  113. 

Jumonville,  Joseph  Coulon,  Sieur  de, 
killed  in  battle  near  Fort  Du- 
quesne,  117,  227. 

Kaskaskia,  89. 

Kelly,  William,  inventor,  347. 

Kentucky,  described,  132-133;  mi- 
gration to,  139. 

Kindergarten,  355. 

Knights  of  the  Golden  Horseshoe, 
131-132. 

Knox  College,  307. 

Lachine  Rapids,  Cartier  at,  7;  Joliet 
loses  records  at,  43. 

La  Galissonniere,  Rolland-Michel 
Barron,  Comte  de,  petition  for  aid 
for  Illinois  colony,  116;  sends 
Celoron  to  take  repossession  of 
Ohio  country,  218-224. 

La  Harpe,  Bernard  de,  394;  explores 
Red  River,  113;  explores  Missouri 
River,  113. 

Lake  steamers,  207-208. 

Lakes-to-gulf  waterway,  96,  212- 
213,  260-261. 

Lalemant,  Gabriel,  Jesuit,  tortured 
to  death  by  Iroquois,  33. 

Land  claims,  167. 

Land  offices,  159. 

La  Salle,  Robert  Rene  Cavelier,  Sieur 
de,  393;  explorations  of,  55-69;  at 
St.  Sulpice,  56;  explores  Lake  On- 
tario, 1669,  57;  meets  Joliet,  57; 
may  have  explored  Ohio,  57-58;  in 
Paris,  1674,  59;  builds  Fort  Fron- 
tenac, 59;  in  Paris,  1677,  59-60; 
describes  western  country,  59-60; 
receives  authority  to  explore  west, 


INDEX 


425 


60-61;  sails  from  Rochelle,  61;  on 
Great  Lakes,  1678,  1679,  198- 
205;  builds  Griffin,  56, 62, 198-203 ; 
returns  to  Fort  Frontenac,  203;  on 
Lake  Michigan,  63 ;  at  St.  Joseph- 
Kankakee  portage,  63,  253;  at  Illi- 
nois village,  64;  builds  Fort  Creve- 
coeur,  64;  begins  building  vessel 
for  Mississippi  River,  64;  returns 
on  foot  to  Fort  Frontenac,  65;  re- 
turns to  Illinois  country,  66;  finds 
Tonty,  66;  forms  Indian  confed- 
eracy, 67;  explores  Mississippi,  67- 
69,  74;  reaches  mouth  of  Missis- 
sippi, 67-69;  takes  possession  of 
Louisiana  for  Louis  XIV,  68;  re- 
turn journey  up  Mississippi  River, 
99-101;  at  Fort  St.  Louis,  101;  his 
plans  opposed,  101;  in  Paris,  1684, 
103 ;  has  interview  with  Louis  XIV, 
103;  expedition  to  mouth  of  Mis- 
sissippi, 103-104;  lands  in  Texas, 
104;  searches  for  Mississippi  River, 
104;  dies  March,  1687,  104;  trib- 
utes to,  104-105;  Tonty  on,  104; 
Parkman  on,  104,  105;  Fiske  on, 
104;  Bancroft  on,  104-105;  Hos- 
mer  on,  105. 

Lavoisier,  Antoine  Laurent,  chemist, 
342. 

Law,  John,  85;  forms  Mississippi 
Company,  IH-II2. 

Le  Boeuf,  Fort,  Washington's  expe- 
dition to,  225-227,  317. 

Le  Caron,  Joseph,  Recollet  friar,  26, 
393;  quoted  on  hardship  of  wil- 
derness travel,  26-27. 

Le  Clercq,  Christian,  "First  Estab- 
lishment of  the  Faith  in  New 
France"  cited,  27. 

Leighton,  Marshall  Ora,  geologist,  95. 

Leisure,  importance  of,  332. 

Le  Jeune,  Paul,  Jesuit  priest,  studies 
Algonquin  language,  28. 

Lescarbot,  Marc,  at  Port  Royal,  17; 
his  appeal  to  France,  18;  his  "His- 
toire  de  la  Nouvelle  France"  cited, 
17,  19- 


Le  Sueur,  Pierre  Charles,  explorer, 
394;  explores  source  of  Mississippi, 
11$. 

Lincoln,  Abraham,  270-290;  signs 
homestead  law,  168;  Mississippi 
voyage  of,  272,  287;  parentage, 
273;  in  Illinois,  273;  education, 
274-279;  his  democracy,  274-275, 
278;  literary  knowledge,  275;  legal 
knowledge,  275-276;  his  devotion 
to  the  Constitution,  277;  Eman- 
cipation Proclamation,  277;  his 
neigh  borliness,  278;  intellectual 
qualities,  279;  Montalembert  on, 
280;  literary  style,  281;  Cooper 
Union  speech,  281,  284;  Douglas 
debate,  281;  Gettysburg  speech, 
281-283;  letter  to  Mrs.  Bixby, 
283-284;  speech  at  Peoria,  285; 
the  "lost"  speech,  285;  his  sense 
of  humor,  285-287;  attitude  on 
slavery,  287;  his  greatness,  288- 
289. 

Lincoln,  Thomas,  273-274. 

Louis  XIV,  king  of  France,  de- 
scribed to  Indians  by  Allouez,  51- 
54;  forbids  further  exploration  of 
Mississippi,  101-102;  refuses  per- 
mission to  Huguenots  to  settle  in 
Louisiana,  108,  219-220;  abso- 
lutism of,  292-294. 

Louisiana,  396;  La  Salle  plans  French 
colony  in,  100-102;  Iberville 
founds  colony,  106-109;  popula- 
tion, 1712,  no;  under  Crozat, 
iio-in;  Mississippi  Company 
formed  to  colonize,  111-112;  east- 
tern  part  of,  ceded  to  England, 
120;  western  part  ceded  to  Spain, 
1 20-1 21;  recovery  of,  urged  by 
Talleyrand,  121-122;  Napoleon 
obtains  cession  of,  122;  ceded 
by  Napoleon  to  United  States, 
122-125;  importance  of,  not  ap- 
preciated   by    Americans,    151- 

153; 

Louisiana  purchase,  123-125,  397; 
importance    not    appreciated    at 


426 


INDEX 


time  of  purchase,  151—153;  cost  of 
considered  excessive,  153. 

Lumber,  commerce  in,  on  Great 
Lakes,  209. 

Lussiere,  La  Motte  de,  French  ex- 
plorer, 199. 

Macarty,    Chevalier    de,    rebuilds 

Fort  Chartres,  116. 
McCormick,  Cyrus  Hall,  inventor, 

invents   the   harvester,    334-336; 

given  cross  of  Legion  of  Honor  by 

Napoleon   III,   335;  honored   by 

French  Academy  of  Science,  336. 
McKinley,  William,  298. 
McMaster,  J.  B.,  "History  of  the 

People    of    the    United    States" 

cited,  152-153. 
Maeterlinck,  Maurice,  330. 
Maisonneuve,  Paul  de  Chomedey, 

founds  Montreal,  8,  393. 
Makarty,  see  Macarty. 
Mallet,  Paul,  explores  New  Mexico, 

113- 
Mallet,  Pierre,  explores  New  Mex- 
ico, 113. 
Mance,  Jeanne,  10. 
Maps — 

Marquette's  map  of  Mississippi 

exploration,  44,  73. 
Joliet's  map  of  Mississippi  ex- 
ploration lost,  44. 
Waldseemuller's,  1507, 1 5 13,  73. 
Garay's  map,  73. 
Bonnecamps  map  of  Celoron's 
expedition,  223. 
Margry,  Pierre,  historian,  "Decou- 
vertes  et  etablissements  des  Fran- 
cais"  cited,  97,  IOI,  109. 
Marquette,  Jacques,  Jesuit  priest, 
393;  at  Pointe  de  St.  Esprit,  37;  at 
Point  St.  Ignace,  38;  explores  Mis- 
sissippi River  with  Joliet,  38-44, 
73-74,  249;  at  Illinois  village,  41; 
reaches  mouth  of  Arkansas  River, 
42;  on  Illinois  River,  42;  second 
expedition  to  Illinois  Indians,  44; 
dies  at  Chicago  portage,  44,  76, 
258;  tradition  of,  preserved  among 


Illinois  Indians,  44-45;  brings 
Ottawas  and  Hurons  to  convoca- 
tion at  Ste.  Marie,  49;  memorial 
cross  erected  to  memory  of,  259. 

Mayflower  descendants,  316. 

Membre,  Zenobius,  Recollet  friar, 
100,  109. 

Menard,  Rene,  Jesuit  priest,  lost  in 
Wisconsin  forests,  37. 

Michigan,  Lake,  Nicolet  explores, 
25;  Joliet  and  Marquette  on,  38; 
La  Salle  on,  63. 

Military  grants,  167. 

Mineral  land  grants,  167;  with- 
drawn from  private  entry,  386. 

Mississippi  bubble,  see  Mississippi 
Company. 

Mississippi  Company,  85,  m-112. 

Mississippi  River,  70-98;  discovered 
by  Marquette  and  Joliet,  41; 
named  Riviere  de  la  Conception, 
41;  named  La  Buade,  41;  La  Salle 
on,  67-69;  Indian  knowledge  of, 
70-71;  French  appreciation  of,  75, 
85;  lack  of  appreciation  by  Amer- 
icans, 86;  length,  77;  crookedness, 
77;  width,  77;  discharge,  77-78; 
navigable  length,  78;  sediment,  78; 
water-power,  78;  stages,  78;  drain- 
age basin,  78;  sources  explored  by 
Le  Sueur,  113;  by  Nicollet,  81-83; 
mouth  of,  described  by  Mrs.  Trol- 
lope,  83;  Hamlin  Garland  on,  85- 
87;  steamboat  traffic  on,  90;  shift- 
ing channel  of,  91, 93;  difficulty  of 
navigation,  91;  control  of  floods, 
92,  94;  storage  reservoirs,  95,  96; 
floods,  93;  loss  by  floods,  93;  jet- 
ties on,  94;  hydro-electric  develop- 
ment, 95-96. 

Mississippi  Valley,  area,  78,  150; 
temperature,  79;  rainfall,  79;  agri- 
cultural resources,  80,  189;  min- 
eral wealth,  80;  future  population, 
80;  described  by  De  Tocqueville, 
81;  survivals  of  French  in,  88-89; 
Germans  plan  settlement  in,  92; 
economic  development,  189,  329- 
353;  American  settlement  of,  138- 


INDEX 


427 


146;  democratic  society  of,  291- 
308,  399;  result  of  land  policy,  295; 
early  individualism  of,  297;  politi- 
cal importance  of,  297-298;  social 
conditionson,  300-301 ;  intellectual 
life,  301;  social  differentiation 
brought  by  wealth,  301;  govern- 
ment regulations  in,  301-305;  con- 
structive individualism  of,  302 
supposed  lack  of  idealism  in,  306 
popular  esteem  for  labor,  306 
social  homogeneity  in,  306-308 
neighborliness  in,  308;  public  spirit 
°f>  3335  virility  of  its  civilization, 
400. 

Missouri  River,  explored  by  La 
Harpe  and  Du  Tisne,  113. 

Mobile  River,  73. 

Montesquieu,  Baron  de  la  Brede,  et 
de,  333. 

Montreal,  Cartier  at,  7-8;  aban- 
doned by  Cartier,  13;  Champlain 
at,  8;  Maisonneuve  at,  8,  393. 

Monts,  Pierre  du  Guast,  Comte  de, 

Moscoso,  Alvarado  de,  Spanish  ex- 
plorer, 73. 
Mt.  Washington,  313. 

Narvaez,  Pamfilo  de,  Spanish  ex- 
plorer, 5,  73. 

National  Conservation  Commission, 
384. 

National  Conservation  Congress, 
385;  declaration  of  principles,  386. 

National  Waterways  Commission,  95. 

Nationalism,  result  of  railroad  de- 
velopment, 187,  188. 

Natural  gas,  375-376;  conservation 
of,  380-381. 

Natural  resources,  waste  of,  in  Mis- 
sissippi Valley,  189-190;  rapid  ex- 
ploitation of,  337-341;  movements 
for  conservation  of,  371-390. 

New  Amsterdam,  35-36. 

New  England,  how  different  from 
New  France,  22,  49,  71-72;  char- 
acter of  inhabitants,  314-316; 
coast  of,  explored  by  French,  309- 


313;  westward  expansion  of,  142- 

143- 

New  France,  392-397;  Parkman  de- 
scribes, 3 ;  different  from  New  Eng- 
land, 22,  49,  72;  paternalism  of 
government,  292-294;  seigniories 
of,  371. 

New  Orleans,  216;  founded,  no;  im- 
portance of,  to  west,  152. 

New  Orleans,  battle  of,  94. 

New  York  City,  240,  314. 

Niagara,  Fort,  La  Salle  builds,  61; 
Aubry's  expedition  to  relieve,  117. 

Niagara  Falls,  described  by  Henne- 
pin,6l,200;  water-power,  200-202. 

Nicolet,  Jean,  French  explorer,  23, 
180;  tells  Champlain  of  Mississippi 
River,  24;  appointed  commis- 
sioner and  interpreter  at  Three 
Rivers,  24;  at  Fox-Wisconsin  port- 
age, 25. 

Nicollet,  Jean  Nicholas,  explores 
sources  of  Mississippi,  81-83. 

Northwest  Ordinance,  154,  160-161; 
Daniel  Webster  on,  160;  provi- 
sions concerning  education,  160. 

Notre  Dame  des  Anges,  370,  393. 

Noue,  Anne  de,  Jesuit  priest,  28. 

Nouvelles  Chartres,  89. 

Ohio,  migration  to,  138. 

Ohio  Land  Company,  221,  225. 

Ohio  River,  La  Salle  may  have  ex- 
plored, 57-58;  control  of  floods, 
95;  Celoron's  expedition,  217-224. 

Oklahoma,  372-374;  constitution, 
373;  school  lands,  373. 

Olbeau,  Jean  d',  Recollet  missionary, 
26. 

Old-age  pensions,  304. 

Olier,  Jean  Jacques,  priest,  127. 

Olmstead,  F.  L.,  report  on  Pitts- 
burgh city  plan,  237-239. 

Ontario,  Lake,  explored  by  La  Salle, 

57- 
"Order  of  Good  Times,"   at   Port 
Royal,  16. 

Panama  Canal,  prophesied  by  Cham- 
plain, 15,  97. 


428 


INDEX 


Parasites,  useful,  303. 

Paris,  arms,  197;  centre  of  explora- 
tion of  New  France,  126-129. 

Parkman,  Francis,  401-418;  his  auto- 
biography, 402;  in  Paris,  402;  sees 
Margry,  403 ;  interest  in  the  woods, 
403 ;  plans  for  historical  work,  404; 
visits  to  historic  sites,  404;  in 
Canadian  forests,  404;  breakdown 
of  his  health,  405;  visits  Rocky 
Mountains,  405;  among  Ogallala 
Indians,  405;  adverse  conditions 
under  which  he  worked,  405-408; 
weakness  of  sight,  406;  progress  of 
historical  work,  407;  visits  to 
Europe,  407;  interest  in  Civil  War, 
407;  his  library,  409;  method  of 
historical  work,  409-410;  his  note- 
books, 410,  414;  vividness  of  his 
style,  412;  Barrett  Wendell  on, 
412;  popular  appeal  of  his  works, 
413;  moral  insight,  413;  his  phil- 
osophical generalization,  414; 
scope  of  his  work,  415;  his  choice 
of  a  subject,  416;  one  of  the 
world's  greatest  historians,  416; 
John  Fiske  on,  416;  his  "Hybridi- 
zation of  Lilies,"  417;  rose  cul- 
ture, 417;  "Pioneers  of  France  in 
the  New  World"  cited,  3;  "La 
Salle"  cited,  40,  69,  101,  102,  104, 
105,  106,  181;  "Montcalm  and 
Wolfe"  cited,  220. 

Penn,  William,  152. 

Pennsylvania,  Scotch-Irish  in,  142. 

Peoria,  Illinois,  216. 

Perrot,  Nicholas,  French  explorer, 
among  Winnebagoes,  46-54;  trans- 
lates Lusson's  proclamation,  53. 

Peter  the  Great,  king  of  Russia,  108. 

Petite  Hermine,  ship,  remains  of,  at 
St.  Malo,  11. 

Petroleum,  352,  375;  Indians'  knowl- 
edge of,  375-376;  conservation  of, 
380. 

Pineda,  Alonzo  Alvarez  de,  Spanish 
explorer,  73. 

Pioneers,  see  Frontiersmen. 

Pitt,  Fort,  242. 


Pittman,  Captain  Philip,  on  Fort 
Chartres,  118. 

Pittsburgh,  216;  tonnage,  229;  iron 
and  steel  industry,  217-218,  230- 
234;  steel  workers,  233-235;  im- 
provement,  236;  city  plan,  237- 

239- 
Pittsburgh  Civic  Commission,  237- 

239- 

Pittsburgh  Flood  Commission,  95. 
Plant  culture  under  glass,  303. 
Play,  importance  of,  356. 
Poetry,  lack  of  appreciation  of,  in 

Mississippi  Valley,  333. 
Point  St.  Ignace,  Jesuit  mission,  38. 
Pointe  de  St.  Esprit,  Jesuit  mission, 

37- 

Ponce  de  Leon,  Juan,  Spanish  ex- 
plorer, explores  Florida,  5. 

Pontiac,  Ottawa  chief,  ally  of  French 
against  English,  117-118. 

Population,  rural,  191;  urban,  191. 

Port  Royal,  Acadia,  17,  19. 

Portage,  Wisconsin,  250;  Zona  Gale 
on,  250-252. 

Portage  paths,  246-257;  French 
names  of,  248;  Chicago -Des 
Plaines,  76,  256-262;  Marquette 
dies  at,  44;  Fox-Wisconsin,  76, 
248-252;  Nicolet  at,  25;  Maumee- 
Wabash,  256;  St.  Joseph-Kanka- 
kee, 75,  252-256;  LaSalle  at,  63. 

Prairie  du  Rocher,  Illinois,  88,  1 18. 

Prairie-schooners,  138,  147. 

Prairies,  Paul  Fountain  on,  84. 

Presque  Isle,  Fort,  226. 

Professional  schools,  364. 

Proportional  representation,  194. 

Ptolemy,  391. 

Public  lands,  150-173;  Andrew  John- 
son on,  153-154;  settlement  of, 
154;  claims  of  States  to,  sur- 
rendered to  Continental  Congress, 
155;  sold  to  pay  Revolutionary 
debt,  157-158;  sale  of,  to  Ohio 
Company,  1 59-161;  lands  re- 
served for  education,  160;  grants 
to  schools,  160-168;  Iowa,  164; 
Minnesota,   365-366;    grants    for 


INDEX 


429 


religion,  161;  democracy  result  of 
government's  policy,  295;  opening 
of  last  reservations,  372-373. 

Quincy,  Josiah,  186;  speech  on  the 
bill  to  admit  Orleans  Territory 
cited,  186. 

Race  segregation  in  schools,  359. 

Radisson,  Pierre  Esprit,  French  ex- 
plorer, 394;  Radisson  and  Groseil- 
liers  explore  the  northern  Missis- 
sippi River,  26,  249. 

Railroad  land  grants,  167,  170. 

Railroads,  evolution  of,  in  America, 
181-187;  the  "creator  of  cities," 
182;  J.  J.  Hill  on,  182-183,  185;  in 
Mississippi  Valley,  80,  183-192; 
economic  importance  of,  189;  land 
grants  to,  167,  170;  prevent  seces- 
sion of  West,  145,  185-189. 

Raymbault,  Charles,  Jesuit  priest,  34. 

Reclamation  land  grants,  167. 

Reclamation  of  arid  lands,  387. 

Recollet  friars  in  New  France,  21, 
26-27. 

Red  River,  explored  by  La  Harpe 
and  Juchereau,  113. 

Referendum,  194. 

Rennie,  George,  348. 

Reservoir,  rights  of  way,  167. 

Rivers,  irregular  flow  of,  379. 

Roads,  evolution  of,  174-179. 

Roberval,  Jean  Francois  de  la  Ro- 
que,  Sieur  de,  commissioned  Lord 
of  Norembega,  12. 

Rochambeau,  Jean  Baptiste  Dona- 
tien  de  Vimeur,  321. 

Rocky  Mountains,  may  have  been 
discovered  by  the  Mallet  brothers, 
113;  discovered  by  Chevalier  de  la 
Verendrye,  113-114. 

Rodents,  control  of,  303. 

Roosevelt,  Nicholas,  builds  first 
steamboat  on  Ohio,  96;  purchases 
coal-mines,  96. 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  298;  predicts 
lakes-to-gulf  waterway,  96-97. 

Rural  population,  decrease  of,  191. 


St.  Ange  de  Belle  Rive,  Louis, 
French  officer,  surrenders  Fort 
Chartres  to  English,  118;  resumes 
command,  130. 

St.  Clair  (Lake),  (Sainte  Claire), 
204. 

St.  Die,  France,  391. 

St.  Joseph,  Michigan,  217. 

St.  Lawrence  River,  discovered  by 
Cartier,  4,  6-8;  Cartier  describes, 
8;  explored  by  Champlain,  15. 

St.  Louis,  Fort,  76;  fortified  by  La 
Salle,  100;  Franco-Indian  colony 
at,  101. 

St.  Louis,  Missouri,  87,  216;  kinder- 
gartens, 355. 

St.  Lusson,  Simon  Francois  Dau- 
mont,  Sieur  de,  French  officer,  at 
Indian  convocation  at  St.  Marie, 
48;  takes  possession  of  northwest, 

St.  Malo,  France,  5. 

St.  Marie,  Indian  convocation  at, 

47-55- 

St.  Mary's  College,  Notre  Dame, 
Indiana,  256. 

St.  Petersburg,  Russia,  108. 

St.  Pierre,  Legardeur  de,  refuses 
Washington's  demand  for  surren- 
der of  Fort  Le  Bceuf,  317-318. 

Sainte-Beuve,  Charles  Augustin, 
"Nouveaux  Lundis"  quoted,  408. 

Sangamon  River,  270. 

Santa  Fe,  expedition  of  the  Mallet 
brothers  to,  113. 

Sault  Ste.  Marie,  canal,  211;  com- 
merce of,  54. 

Scandinavians  in  Mississippi  Valley, 
92. 

Scholarship,  lack  of  appreciation  of, 
in  Mississippi  Valley,  333. 

Schoolhouses,  log,  354. 

School-teachers,  354-355;  number, 
360;  salary,  360;  social  value  of, 
360-361. 

Schools,  elementary,  355-362;  equip- 
ment of  modern  schools,  355;  cur- 
riculum, 356;  evolution  of  system, 


43Q 


INDEX 


356-359;  significance  of,  357;  func- 
tion of,  in  a  democracy,  357-359; 
as  instrument  of  social  homo- 
geneity, 359-362;  flag  salute  in, 
361. 

Schools,  secondary,  in  Mississippi 
Valley,  362-363. 

Schools,  see  also  Education. 

Scotch-Irish  pioneers,  in  Mississippi 
Valley,  141-142. 

Scurvy,  Cartier's  men  die  of,  11; 
cure  for,  learned  from  Indians,  11; 
in  Acadia,  16. 

Secession  of  west  threatened,  145. 

Seigniories,  of  St.  Lawrence  Valley, 

371. 
Seven  Years'  War,  see  French  and 

Indian  War. 
Shipping,  on  Great  Lakes,  207. 
Sioux  Indians,  37,  38. 
Skilligallee,  395. 

Slavery,  Lincoln's  attitude  on,  287. 
Social  legislation,  302-304. 
Socrates,  288-289. 
Soil,  erosion,  377;  exhaustion,  377- 

378;  conservation,  382. 
Soil  surveys,  343-345. 
South     Bend,     Indiana,     253-256; 

wagon  factory,  255;  plough  fac- 
tory, 255;  sewing-machine  factory, 

255;  toy  factory,  255. 
Spain,    western   part   of    Louisiana 

ceded  to,  121;  returned  to  France, 

122. 
Spotswood,  Alexander,  governor  of 

Virginia,    western   expedition   of, 

131-132. 
Storage  reservoirs,  95. 
Swamp  land  grants,  167. 

Taft,  William  H.,  188,  298. 

Talleyrand-Perigord,  Charles  Mau- 
rice de,  Prince  de  Benevent,  urges 
recovery    of    western    Louisiana, 

X2I-I22. 

Talon,  Jean  Baptiste,  intendant,  38. 
Teachers'  pensions,  236. 
Tennessee,  migration  to,  139. 
Texas,  migration  to,  139. 


Thevenot,  "Recueil  de  Voyages," 
1682,  257. 

Timber  and  stone  grants,  167,  168. 

Timber-culture  grants,  167. 

Titanium,  use  of,  in  steel  manufac- 
ture, 350. 

Tocqueville,  Alexis  de,  "Democracy 
in  America"  cited,  81,  134,  394. 

Tonawanda,  New  York,  209. 

Tonty,  Henri  de,  French  explorer. 
61,  109,  199,  394;  at  Fort  Creve- 
cceur,  65;  attacked  by  Iroquois, 
66;  found  by  La  Salle,  66;  an- 
nounces discovery  of  mouth  of 
Mississippi  River,  100;  letter  from, 
to  La  Salle,  107. 

Towns  of  Mississippi  Valley,  184. 

Trade-schools,  303. 

Traders,  English,  in  western  coun- 
try, 132. 

Trappers,  English,  in  western  coun- 
try, 132. 

Treaty  of  Paris,  1763,  119. 

Treaty  of  Paris,  1783,  321. 

Trollope,  Mrs.  T.  A.,  "Domestic 
Manners  of  the  Americans"  cited, 
83;  on  mouth  of  Mississippi  River, 

S3- 

Tuberculosis,  control  of,  303. 

Turner,  Frederic  Jackson,  250;  "Sig- 
nificance of  the  Mississippi  Valley 
in  American  History"  cited,  137, 
295;  "Rise  of  the  New  West" 
cited,  139. 

Twain,  Mark,  90-92;  "Life  on  the 
Mississippi"  cited,  74,  77,  78,  go- 
al- 

United  States,  debt  to  France,  120, 
392-400. 

Universities,  of  Mississippi  Valley, 
364-368. 

University  of  Illinois,  366. 

University  of  Iowa,  366. 

University  of  Michigan,  364. 

University  of  Minnesota,  365;  pub- 
lic lands  granted  to,  365-366. 

University  of  Notre  Dame,  256. 

University  of  Texas,  366. 


INDEX 


431 


University  of  Wisconsin,  364-365. 
Urban  population,  see  Cities. 

Van  Hise,  Charles  R.,  388;  his  "Con- 
servation of  Natural  Resources" 
quoted,  374~389- 

Verendrye,  Pierre  Gaultier  de  Va- 
renne  de  la,  French  explorer,  394, 
411-412;  western  explorations  of, 

II3-IH- 

Verendrye,  Pierre,  Chevalier  de  la, 
394,  411-412;  expedition  to  Rocky 
Mountains,  113-114;  discovers 
Big  Horn  Mountains  and  Wind 
River  Range,  113-114. 

Verrazano,  Giovanni  da,  Italian  nav- 
igator, explores  east  coast  of  Amer- 
ica, 5,  310;  discovers  White  Moun- 
tains, 5,  3 10.  _ 

Vespucci,  Amerigo,  391. 

Vignau,  Nicolas  de,  deceives  Cham- 
plain  as  to  a  western  waterway, 
21. 

Villiers,  Coulon  de,  goes  to  avenge 
death  of  Jumonville,  228,  319-320. 

Villiers,  Neyon  de,  French  officer, 
117. 

Vimont,  Barth61emy,  Jesuit  priest, 
at  Montreal,  9. 

Vincennes,  Indiana,  130. 

Virginia,  interest  in  western  country, 
132. 

Virginia-Indian  Company,  132. 

Voltaire,  "French  in  America"  cited, 
225. 

War  of  Independence,  rendered  pos- 
sible by  French,  119. 

Washington,  George,  396-397; 
youth,  3 14;  officer  of  Virginia  mi- 
litia, 314;  expedition  against 
French  in  Ohio  country,  117,  225- 
228,  317-320;  at  Fort  Le  Boeuf, 
317-319;  attacks  French  under 
Jumonville,  319;  defeated  at  Fort 
Necessity,  320;  western  trip  of, 
188,  322-328;  interest  in  develop- 
ment of  country,  322-327;  diary  of 
western    trip,  323-324;  letter  to 


Chastellux,  325;  on  importance  of 
Potomac  canal,  325;  advocates  for- 
mation of  new  States  in  west,  326; 
at  Maryland  Assembly  in  interest 
of  western  development,  326;  in- 
directly instrumental  in  calling 
Constitutional  Convention,  326; 
his  greatness,  327-328. 

Water-power  development,  382;  Ni- 
agara Falls,  200-202,  382. 

Waterways,  387. 

Webster,  Daniel,  "First  Speech  on 
Foot's  Resolution"  cited,  160. 

Welland  Canal,  21 1,  214. 

Wells,  Herbert  George,  "Future  in 
America"  quoted,  337,  361. 

Wendell,  Barrett,  on  Parkman,  412. 

West,  racial  elements  of  settlers  in, 
142-149;  society  of,  distinctive, 
137,  144-149;  secession  of  west, 
threatened,  145;  political  impor- 
tance of,  188-189;  see  also  Missis- 
sippi Valley. 

Western  World,  newspaper,  132. 

Westerner,  versatility  of,  299;  social 
achievement,  300-301;  construc- 
tive individualism  of,  302. 

Westward  migration,  132-149. 

Wheat,  production  of,  in  Mississippi 
Valley,  339. 

Whistler,  James  Abbott  McNeill, 
400. 

White,  Edward  Douglas,  Chief  Jus- 
tice, 188. 

White  Mountains,  5,  309;  discovered 
by  Verrazano,  5. 

Whitman,  Walt,  "Democratic  Vis- 
tas" quoted,  240. 

Wind  River  Mountains,  discovered 
by  La  Verendrye  brothers,    113, 

"4- 

Winsor,  Justin,  "Mississippi  Basin" 
cited,  80. 

Wisconsin  River,  249. 

Wright,  Orville  and  Wilbur,  inven- 
tors, 208. 

Yorktown,  surrender  of  British  at, 
321. 


42845 


A     000  672  908     1 


1 


